It's been just nine years since Chandra Levy disappeared, touching off a search that exposed the scandal of an affair between a promiscuous congressman and a 24-year-old federal government intern.

That the incident can seem further in the past owes much to timing. Its run in the national headlines ended with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and resumed briefly when her remains turned up in a Washington, D.C., park in May 2002.

The story faded from national media attention for years before the March 2009 announcement that a Salvadoran laborer was charged with the killing -- and not former U.S. Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif., who lost his political career in a wave of national scorn over the scandal. She had apparently been randomly attacked in the park.

Now, with Ingmar Guandique awaiting a murder trial, two Washington Post reporters, Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz, who fingered Mr. Guandique as the killer in a 2008 series, have written an adroit true-crime narrative that tells the story from the perspectives of the Levy family, Mr. Condit, Washington police and others -- from police to media figures who played roles in the true-life drama.

The book is chiefly an expansion of their newspaper series, which publicly cleared Mr. Condit and laid bare a sheaf of mistakes by Washington police that made solving Ms. Levy's murder take years.

At the time Ms. Levy disappeared in 2001, Washington's Metropolitan Police was led by Charles H. Ramsey, now police commissioner of Philadelphia. This book, like the series before it, puts the bungled investigation on his department's shoulders, from leads not pursued to a dysfunctional bureaucracy whose constant media leaks made investigators distrust their bosses.

Mr. Ramsey has declined to challenge the authors' findings in their newspaper series or the book.

Instead of focusing on him, the book is driven by character studies of the detectives and others associated with the day-to-day investigation. Their lives, like those of other central players in the investigation, are shown in vividly detailed portraits, perhaps most effectively in the introductory chapter, about a genteel bone collector whose wanderings in Rock Creek Park unearthed Ms. Levy's remains.

At times, the book's character-snapshot structure can become a distraction, particularly when its focus wanders onto members of the media.

Though the book capitalizes impressively on the depth of reportage in the newspaper series, the conclusions feel rushed, since the case against Mr. Guandique is still pending. For all we learn of how the Levy tragedy exploded, from Mr. Condit's affair to its disastrous consequences, the book ends before the last chapter of the story has played out.

Mr. Higham and Ms. Horwitz have turned their newspaper series into a thorough, incisive and compelling book. Hopefully, a future revision will include the endgame of the open criminal case.

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.