Stairway to Nowhere: A Snap Malek Reader

Chicago Tribune police reporter Steve "Snap" Malek is one of the newspaper's best feature writers, and now it looks like one of his well-crafted feature stories might come back to bite him. Malek had, at one time, turned out a laudatory piece about the heroics of a black man in the highly segregated Chicago of the mid-20th century. But now his erstwhile hero, Willson Forrest, stands accused of the near-fatal beating of his wife, who lingers in a coma. Malek, however, doubts Forrest's guilt,...