The Murder Children — John Dudley Ball

Here is a frightening, realistic novel of terror in the streets, of the growing power wielded by lawless youth gangs.

When newly-promoted Lieutenant Ralph Mott of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was assigned to gang control in East Los Angeles, he knew little about the barrio or the extent of the violence there. Although he had heard of the seventeen warring youth gangs, he was unprepared for fourteen-year-old hitmen, for the savage brutality of boys still in their teens. Now with gang activity increasing, he plunged into the fight to control the armed robberies, the gang rapings, the shotgun attacks on houses, and the constant warfare between hostile gangs that raged on every street and hillside. Most of the people in the Mexican-American community were law-abiding, yet Mott soon learned that fear of gang vengeance kept them silent when they had witnessed a crime.

Chillingly accurate in its detail, The Murder Children is a story of fast, exciting action. It is also a story of people -- of individual gang members, of priests and prostitutes, of good citizens and bad. And it is the story of Lieutenant Mott, who with the men and women of the sheriff's forces, had the dangerous job of trying to contain a spreading evil.

John Ball was sworn into the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and then spent more than two years working in the barrio, riding patrol units, meeting with gang members, riding in their cars, and sometimes helping to put their dead bodies into the coroner's wagons. The result of these experiences is this powerful book.