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Martin Preib Wrote & Published Burn Patterns, Crooked City & The Wagon and Other Stories from the City

Martin Preib is a Chicago writer and cop. His first book, The Wagon and Other Stories from the City, was published by the University of Chicago Press.

In 2006, he began investigating wrongful conviction cases in Chicago and determined that many of these exonerations were false. His work led to undermining the most influential wrongful conviction case in the state’s history, chronicled in his second book Crooked City.

In this, his second book about a Chicago murder case in which an offender walked out of death row, award-winning writer and police officer Martin Preib documents his journey from doubt to certainty that the offender in this case should not have been released from prison.

Preib’s earlier book, Crooked City, undermined the central so-called “wrongful conviction” case that was seminal in generating an industry in Illinois aimed at overturning convictions. Now Preib moves beyond that case to the Madison Hobley arson, meticulously unraveling, strand by strand, the convoluted tapestry of Chicago’s corruption that led to a 2003 pardon of Hobley by Illinois Governor George Ryan, allowing Hobley to walk free from the 1987 arson on Chicago’s South Side that left seven people dead, including his own wife and child

In this second collection of connected essays, Chicago cop Martin Preib takes on seemingly unrelated murder cases, all dating from one year, 1982, including some in which offenders were released as part of the wrongful conviction movement. 

This book shatters reader assumptions—about the workings of justice, the objectivity of the media, and the role of the police in the city of Chicago, even calling into question allegations of police torture in the notorious cases against Jon Burge.

Excerpts from the Crooked City Blog here