Pringle’s fast-paced book is a master class in investigative journalism, explaining how a reporter wrestles information and documents from reluctant sources and government officials. It is a stark look at the weakening of local news, especially at The Los Angeles Times ... a compelling version of this narrative that one can rip through in a few long afternoons at the beach ... Pringle doesn’t let the reader linger on the salacious details without considering the many ways that unchecked power fosters depravity and corruption, a shopworn idea that seems to have fresh relevance in 2022, when abuse of authority is on the rise and checks on that abuse seem ever less likely to win out ... Pringle delivers his account in a torrent of sharp storytelling and righteous score-settling that might seem petty if the stakes were not so grave.
... part exposé, part primer on investigative journalism, part saga about the abuse of power. At its heart, it is the story of a whistleblower and a newsroom trying to do the right thing against great odds ... It also reflects the challenges of the modern media landscape and the intense discussions surrounding the media’s traditional role of holding the powerful accountable.
Behind-the-scenes account ... The bad guys in Pringle’s book are real, but it’s not always clear if he knows who they are. He spends nearly as much time writing about his conflicts with top editors at the Los Angeles Times as he does the doctors at the heart of the book ... He spends an inordinate amount of time on what feels like score settling with the newspaper’s former top editors ... This ugly tit-for-tat overshadows the real villains of the book. Pringle is at his best when he focuses on the doctors.
... a powerful and genuinely original addition to the investigative journalism genre ... The tropes of the investigative reporter genre abound, and Pringle honestly gets to them ... It takes a lot of dogged reporting to uncover the truth of the Puliafito story, and Pringle describes it all in meticulous detail. Maybe a little too much. Few books have ever managed to convey just how tedious and frustrating investigative reporting can really be: there’s phone call after phone call, repeated property and criminal record checks revealing nada, multiple trips across town to get to the Knocking on the door of a potential source ends with bupkis ... Pringle has provided us with a book that shows how power works in Los Angeles, a city where a new breed of film noir corruption is thriving in our tech-economy landscape. It’s a city where the privileged do whatever it takes to protect their friends and allies, and where small bands of insurgents work tirelessly to expose their behavior.
... riveting ... [a] remarkably immersive narrative ... Bad City, a startling tale of people looking the other way and behaving ever so badly, never lets up. It is one whopper of a true-crime story, written with an immediacy bound to win readers.
