In the early 1990s, the public in the United States were bombarded with accounts about the ‘super-predator’—a young, primarily black, trigger-happy individual, who would prey on law-abiding citizens and would cause a huge increase in criminality. A gloomy picture of what was supposed to happen throughout that decade was painted. However, instead of the supposed unprecedented increase, the United States experienced a prolonged and persistent fall in crime. And while several explanations of varying influence were put forward for this quite unexpected development, it was as if criminologists were genuinely taken by surprise. Most explanations saw the drop as an effect of policies such as new police strategies, increased reliance on prisons or the disruption of drug markets; but very few capitalized on the discipline's arsenal to disentangle the factors contributing to and producing rich theoretical accounts of the decline (Levitt 2004). Such omission, or failure, is serious and the stakes are indeed very high: how was it possible that we were unable to anticipate such change? And since we have been able to know a great deal about crime as a complex social issue, how it is possible that we have been less than able to explain the drop as a process driven by an equally complex articulation of social forces? Such complaints provide the starting point of Karen F. Parker's book, Unequal Crime Decline: Theorising Race, Urban Inequality and Criminal Violence. Professor Parker, who is known for her research on crime, structural factors and the urban environment, takes issue both with the general acceptance of the view that the crime drop has been an undifferentiated and universal experience for American society and with the fact that our prior advances in the theoretical knowledge of how different social groups contribute to and are affected by the issue of crime have not been put to work to explain the crime decline. Parker's intervention features a focus on race and gender disparities in crime, and fills, therefore, a known and important gap: several authors, such as Hawkins (2003), have highlighted the reluctance of the criminological enterprise and social sciences in general to engage in fruitful research and discussion, especially on the differences in crime (and particularly violence) along racial lines, with some notable exemptions.