The Lives Less Ordinary series brings you the most exciting, adventurous and entertaining true-life writing that is out there, for men who are time-poor but want the best. Lives Less Ordinary drops you into extreme first-hand accounts of human experience, whether that's the adrenaline-pumping heights of professional sport, the brutality of the modern battlefield, the casual violence of the criminal world, the mind-blowing frontiers of science, or the excesses of rock 'n' roll, high finance and Hollywood. Lives Less Ordinary also brings you some of the finest comic voices around, on every subject from toilet etiquette to Paul Gascoigne.

Detectives Pete Razanskas and Marcella Winn are the real-life McNulty and Bunk from The Wire. The first: a 22-year LAPD veteran. The second: a rookie from the hood. Jump in a car with them and find out just how you catch a South-Central gangland killer from a cold start through a trail of witnesses, victims and killers. The real thing is more shocking and enthralling than any TV recreation.

This digital bite has been extracted from Miles Corwin's gripping book The Killing Season.