LA Times reporter Jill Leovy has sold a book to Spiegel & Grau that expands on her excellent Homicide Report blog, which chronicled murders in Los Angeles County (845 in all) during 2007.

Publisher’s Lunch says Leovy’s book — The Homicide Report: Black Men, Murder and America’s Unseen Catastrophe — will weave together “a kaleidoscopic narrative about a murder-wracked community in South Los Angeles with a new theory about race and America’s homicide epidemic.”

In April, CNN did a ridealong with Leovy for a story about her efforts to document every slaying in a vast urban county that covers more than 4,000 miles and stretches from the desert of Palmdale, past affluent Pasadena to the seaside docks of Long Beach.

Like most big-city newspapers, the one Leovy works for — The Los Angeles Times — reports only the most “newsworthy” cases. But those killings, elementary school drive-bys and celebrity murders only account for 10 percent of the county’s homicides, Leovy found.
She wanted to go deeper, to put a human face on the toll homicide was taking, particularly in L.A.’s black and Latino communities.
“The Web offered what the paper did not: unlimited space,” Leovy wrote.

Read more and check out the video here.

* Updated: The Times’ Jacket Copy litblog has a Q&A with Leovy about her book project. “The book will be about the syndrome of high homicide rates among blacks in America, their causes and consequences,” she says.