Resurrection Networks

California’s fifth-largest city has been busted. Its formerly bullet-pocked mall lies in heaps of rubble, bulldozed and cyclone-fenced. The tattoo parlors and bars on Ocean Avenue have been razed to make way for a future postponed indefinitely. Long Beach is down to its last sentence suspended upon completion of urban renewal. Jimmy Ryan, 27, a recovering alcoholic and former Poly High varsity basketball player, drives a City of Long Beach detox van. On his evening break, Ryan rolls into Del Amo Park to watch the playground basketball games. Hundreds of cartons of stolen cigarettes fill the back of his vehicle. Just after dark, three people hear four gunshots. Abdul Contreras, 19, recently released from South Bay Boys Correctional and living with his mother and stepfather, is last off the basketball courts; Jin Lin, a cigarette wholesaler, walks into the park in search of her child's father; and Cole Johnson, formerly a rising star in Sports at the San Francisco Chronicle , now a stringer for the local Lighthouse-Beacon , grappling with alcoholism, divorce, and a warrant, sits on a hilltop in the park making notes for a feature he can't finish. Channel Eight's forensics expert and the hottest crime reporter in LA, Jane Fitzgerald, arrives with her crew and goes live at the scene. She’s 36, a Harvard and UCLA grad who has put in her time and developed a winning dressed in capri pants slung low enough to show her navel ring on camera, she teaches her audience the science of homicide. As police comb the park, her crew shoots a tease for the news. With the steady metallic rhythms of rap and the newspaper business in the background, with the hype of crime TV and sportstalk radio in the air, the third person narrative unfolds from the points of view of Abdul, Jin, Cole, and Jane. Each has a personal stake in the fatal shooting of Ryan and, increasingly, in each other. As the mystery around the killing is tugged apart, the story focuses on the intricate, feverish vocations of reporting and selling, and on the hopes and costs of reinvention, both personal and civic.