While the city slept

On a summer night in 2009, a violent crime in a Seattle neighborhood joins three lives. Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper are newly in love, each having spent years searching for direction before finding the other. Isaiah Kalebu, twenty-three, is sliding into a dangerous psychological decline.

This is true crime and reportage by Eli Sanders, whose newspaper coverage of the case earned him a Pulitzer Prize. Kalebu's background is traced through a distant, authoritarian father and a mother whose family has a history of mental illness.

The book follows Kalebu's path toward violence. Family members, police, mental health workers, lawyers and judges all saw it happening, and none of them stopped it. The crime is treated as one of opportunity, made possible by a string of missed ones.

The reporting is deep and the approach human-level, in the manner of The Other Wes Moore and also The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. Through one case, it examines the state of mental health care in the United States, and it also follows the love and forgiveness that come after the attack.

The question running through it is how a disturbed young man could fall through the cracks again and again, and who paid for it.