The man nobody killed Life, death, and art in Michael Stewart's New York

This sterling true crime account from Edgar winner Green (Last Call) plunges readers into the gritty landscape of 1980s New York City. Against that backdrop, Green introduces Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old Black artist who was fatally beaten by Transit Authority officers at a subway station in lower Manhattan in the fall of 1983. The officers claimed Stewart was visibly drunk or high and tagging the subway walls, but witnesses--including a young Rob Zombie--and certain details, including the officers' assertion that the scrawny Stewart knocked them to the ground, cast doubt on their version of events. Soon, the case became a rallying cry for those pushing back against the NYPD's brutal treatment of Black New Yorkers. Balancing propulsive pacing, careful research, and shrewd cultural analysis, Green convincingly highlights the failures of justice that led to Stewart's death, and examines the impact of the case on the work of artists including Toni Morrison (who drew from the Stewart case for her play, Dreaming Emmett) and Spike Lee. It's a harrowing look at a forgotten tragedy. Agent: David Patterson, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (Mar.)

A Black man dies after the police brutally beat him in public, but no one is held accountable. This smart, no-stone-unturned investigation into the horrific encounter between police and a young man of color doubles as a perceptive portrait of 1980s New York City, where, then as now, cynicism and corruption so often ran roughshod over the relatively powerless. Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old artist whose social circles overlapped with a who's who of downtown bohemia, was arrested on Sept. 15, 1983, for allegedly writing on a subway station wall. Police say he resisted, requiring numerous officers to control him. Stewart was unconscious, with "bruises all over," Green writes, when police took him to Bellevue Hospital, where he died later that month. Green, a dogged journalist and the author ofLast Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, uses court documents and news accounts, along with his own interviews, to craft a damning portrait of violence without consequences. Twelve witnesses testified that "multiple officers kicked or beat" Stewart, Green writes, and doctors found choke marks on his neck. But against a backdrop that suggested city officials didn't care--police brutality, Mayor Ed Koch said, was "a phony, false issue"--the six officers facing charges were found not guilty. Perversely, they seem to have beaten the charges in part because with more than one officer hitting Stewart, it was impossible to determine who inflicted which injuries. Those who knew Stewart remember him as a sensitive soul, and Green's reporting places him in a fertile creative milieu, an acquaintance of graffiti artist Keith Haring, a crowd-scene reveler in an early Madonna video, and one of the inspirations for a character murdered by police in Spike Lee'sDo the Right Thing. Incisively probing the violent death of a Black artist in police custody. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.