It was a time of hope and desperation, a time of reckoning . . .

In the early 1960s, the Mad Men era, a mood of menace gripped New York City. The crime rate was growing and violence was becoming a daily reality for citizens in every neighbourhood. At the centre of the unrest was a poisonous divide between two camps: the deeply corrupt and racist police of the era and the African American community.

Then, on 28 August 1963 - the day on which Martin Luther King Jr stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and declared, ''I have a dream'' - two young white women were murdered in their Manhattan apartment. The killings struck fear through the city and ignited a ten-year saga of racial violence and unrest.

An epic true-life story of murder, injustice and defiance, The Savage City draws on interviews with participants and extensive research to tell the stories of three very different New Yorkers - an innocent man wrongly accused of murder, a corrupt cop and a militant Black Panther - and to explore this traumatic decade in the city''s history.