Nemesis One man and the battle for Rio

In a long and impressive journalistic career, Glenny has made a specialty of the territory where violence and complexity meet. After years covering the Balkans (which, in the famous aphorism, "produce more history than they can consume locally"), he moved on to international organized crime. Now he has turned to drugs and corruption in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Reading "Nemesis" is like taking a walking tour of Baltimore's underworld with Stringer Bell. Glenny's main source is a tall, thin, dark-eyed gangster named Antônio Francisco Bonfim Lopes, once the most wanted man in Rio, but since 2011, an inmate in one of Brazil's maximum-security prisons. Lopes ruled Rio's largest and most notorious slum, Rocinha, which sits adjacent to the glamorous city of beaches and bikinis and samba. Prosperous Rio willfully averts its gaze from its grim, crowded favelas and never ventures inside. But Rocinha is Glenny's kind of place. Glenny tells stories aplenty of gold-lacquered Uzis and crooks who collect sloths and alligators in their private zoos, but his real interest runs more to cash flow than to blood flow. His aim is to explain the nuts and bolts of Brazil's drug trade. This is an ambitious task, in part because there are so many warring gangs and so many branches of the police to keep straight. Endless levels of corruption and double-dealing make matters all the murkier. Most true-crime accounts are heavy on car chases and shootouts, and light on analysis. Glenny turns that formula upside down. He is at his best in a quieter voice, sorting out why the police cannot simply swoop into a favela and arrest Mr. Big, and how street lookouts work and, especially, how a smart young Brazilian with a sick baby could transform himself into a crime lord.