Based on reader feedback, web analytics, SN&R’s storytelling history and the broader community conversation, here are the top ten stories for 2024 that we think are worth a second look if you missed them the first time.

10. ‘An Irish elegy: Sacramento mourns the loss of Celtic fiddle sensation St. John Fraser’ by Casey Rafter (Arts & Culture)

Future Sacramento historians will definitely know Casey Rafter’s byline. Since becoming a contributing writer for SN&R, he’s penned moving memorials on the likes of Skip Maggiora, founder of Skip’s Music, not to mention the histories of beloved venues like Luna’s Café and The Torch Club and in-depth profiles musicians as diverse as Gabe Nelson and Mick Martin. Last March, Rafter stepped up to the plate to compose a remembrance of Geith Saint John “Sinjin” Fraser, a member of the band One Eyed Reilly and probably the best-known Celtic fiddler in Northern California. Rafter’s piece is informative, touching, poignant and humanizing. It has all the ingredients for a true Irish weeper.    

9. ‘Jealousy. Abuse. Stalking. An end. What led to the tragedy at House of Oliver’ by Scott Thomas Anderson (News)

Domestic violence continues to be a little-discussed but widespread scourge tearing at the region’s social fabric. Unfortunately, there have been many years where the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office has been compelled to release what’s called The Domestic Violence Death Review Report, a document chronicling cases in which a history of domestic violence and/or stalking ultimately resulted a homicide. Three years ago, a tale of partner abuse, flagrant stalking and failed restraining orders led to a stunning and highly traumatizing murder in public. For staff members working at the House of Oliver wine bar in East Roseville, nothing could have prepared them for what happened. It wasn’t until 2024 that enough evidence had been formally presented in court that SN&R could engage in a long-term investigative piece that brought readers the real story behind the headlines. It’s a report we hope might save lives in the future.  

8. ‘From Jackpot to The Truth, Lee Bob Watson remains the mysterious rhythm master of Sacramento songwriting’ by Casey Sexton (Arts & Culture)

Casey Sexton had been a well-established music promotor for years before she started lending her regional and national touring experience – and skills with the pen – to the digital pages of SN&R. Her review of Forever Goldrush’s “Moon Flowers” and her profile on Cosmic Roots could have spruced up any music publication on the West Coast – and we were lucky to be where both landed. However, Sexton’s recent profile of Lee Bob Watson, who’s been packing clubs in the City of Trees for two decades, highlights a stylistic approach that’s quintessentially News & Review. While our publication continues to evolve, it’s nice to know that some elements of it have not changed.    

7. ‘Beauty in the eyes of the community: Nonprofit focuses on making unhoused people ‘feel inherently beautiful’’ by Katerina Graziosi (News)

SN&R has won numerous awards for its coverage of Sacramento’s unhoused population over the years. In the past, the best of those pieces were often written by Raheem Hosseini, Dave Kempa or the late Amy Yannello: They used engaging, elevated writing to present their subjects as flesh-and-blood individuals who readers could empathize with, if not relate to. This piece written by the very talented Katerina Graziosi has a similar effect, all while highlighting the merits of a little-known program meant to give Sacramentans basic comfort and dignity. There’s also a poignant story behind how the small but mighty initiative got started, which Graziosi manages to capture in her reporting.  

6. ‘Sacramento percussionist Jay Myers on the power of music’ by Sena Christian (Arts & Culture)

This piece is everything that an arts profile should be. Given that it’s penned by one of Sacramento’s true media pros, that is not surprising. Sena Christian knows how to find fascinating people to write about, and with Jay Myers as the centerpiece, this profile is another home run: Myers is one of the Capital City’s renaissance people – captain of the Sacramento Kings Drumline, co-director of the drum line for Sacramento State’s Black Honors College and the percussionists for a hugely popular local band called Cosmic Roots. In this tight, economically composed piece, Christian brings you into his backstory, as well as the artistic obsessions driving him. This profile first appeared in Solving Sacramento’s Sac Art Pulse print zine.  

5. ‘Things fell apart: Inside the controversial CHP operation that triggered a gun battle and hostage murder in Roseville’ by Scott Thomas Anderson (News)

SN&R was reporting on issues of police oversight and criminal justice reform long before it was in vogue to do so around the Capital. The news tab on our homepage doesn’t just have drop-down category for straight crime reporting, it also has a separate drop-down category for ‘police reform’ coverage; and the result of this 19-month investigation currently sits on both of those menus. In one sense, ‘Things Fell Apart’ is very much about the alleged murderer, hostage-taker and jail-escapee Eric Abril, though in another respect, it probes a series of highly questionable tactical decisions by the California Highway Patrol when it came to capturing him (at least, capturing Abril the first time). After CHP officers and Abril turned a languid Roseville park into a terrifying war zone, people wanted to know how much state police had willfully chosen to put the public at-risk. The official answer was radio silence. For more than a-year-and-a-half, CHP and other law enforcement agencies volunteered almost nothing as to what had happened that day. Yet, with patience, well-placed sources, crime scene-reconstruction and the mechanisms of the legal system, SN&R was finally allowed to tell a fulsome story of what went down. And it’s not pretty …     

4. ‘Fanny the all-female rock band with Sacramento roots everyone should hear about’ by Steph Rodriguez (Arts & Culture)

These days, when people mention guitar-wielding Filipinas from Sacramento, they’re usually talking about Country Swing Queen, Mae McCoy. But long before McCoy’s teenage love of rockabilly helped her learn the six-string, two sisters attending McClatchy High School were on their way to setting the California’s rock scene on fire. Their names were June and Jean Millington and, together with other members of the band Fanny, they embarked on a sojourn from the City of Trees to Hollywood – and landed a deal with Reprise Records along the way. The writer of this piece, Steph Rodriguez, is a perennial favorite with SN&R readers; and she doesn’t disappoint in this fascinating piece about how an immigrant experience in Northern California collided head-long with rock’s most ambitious moment in LA.  It’s also an underground piece of Sacramento history that’s due to come into the light.   

3. ‘Sacramento’s first hi-fi bar debuts with tracks pressed to vinyl’ by Katerina Graziosi (Arts & Culture)

This is just a beautifully written piece about two couples attempting to bring something unique to Sacramento’s creative life. The arrival of Legend Has It in Downtown heralded Sacramento’s first hi-fi listening bar. But rather than punch-up a straightforward business report about its opening, Katerina Graziosi set out to capture the heart of why the venue exists – entrancing experience, sonic atmosphere and vintage vibrations. She also does a great job elucidating a little-known mid-century vinyl culture from Japan, and how that ties to the shared vision of four determined entrepreneurs in our city. This is the kind of story that doesn’t announce something new has appeared on the scene, it subtly entices you to want to see, hear and feel that very thing for yourself.    

2. ‘‘What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light’: After 40 years, investigators make arrest in shuddering murder of Madeline Garcia’ by Scott Thomas Anderson (News)

There is no point in belaboring what’s already been shared in SN&R’s weekly newsletter about the investigative work our publication put into this unsolved murder over the last four years. The case involves a numbing crime that went down in 1984 near the Union Pacific switchyard, long before Roseville was a mecca of retail power and still chugging along as a blue-collar railroad hub. In September of that year, a local grandmother named Madeline Garcia was brutalized and desecrated in the shadows of the city’s old town. Roseville detectives worked the hell out of the scene. They couldn’t get any traction. In the coming decades, other investigators worked the hell out of the case file. They couldn’t get any traction. It was only after Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, was captured in Citrus Heights through a novel DNA tracking procedure that Madeline Garcia’s case seemed viable again. Roseville detectives felt that way. SN&R felt that way. As police began using their new DNA hunting technique, our publication started independently re-interviewing numerous people involved in the story, as well as spending dozens of hours combing county and state archives to recreate Garcia’s life and world. All of that work paid off this year when SN&R officially broke the story that the alleged killer had been identified and arrested in Southern California.     

1.‘Sacramento judge rules DWR lacks authority to issue revenue bonds to finance the Delta Tunnel’ by Dan Bacher (News)

Dan Bacher has been a journalist in Northern California for 41 years now, and that might partly explain how he managed to break what, in reality, is one of the state’s biggest political, environmental and cultural stories of the year. The sad fact is that so many experienced newspaper editors and reporters in the Sacramento Region have left the industry that our competing newsrooms don’t appear to have a clue about this. Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed Delta Conveyance Project, better known as “The Delta Tunnel,” would be the largest public infrastructure project built in California in two generations. It is also the state’s most-universally opposed infrastructure project in living memory. For environmentalists, indigenous tribes, historic legacy towns and an array of small business owners, the Delta Tunnel is just the Owens Valley all over again – a massive water heist, an act of habitat destruction and a governmental decision to re-victimize Native Americans by erasing parts of their culture and spiritual inheritance again. So, who wants the Delta Tunnel? A handful of distant agri-billionaires and special interest groups, some of whom are mega-donors to Gavin Newsom’s political coffers. It would be hard to imagine an ongoing news story where the stakes are higher. Through the dogged, old school work of stalking commission meetings, state hearings and court appearances, Bacher was able to break the story for SN&R that the Newsom Administration doesn’t even have a legal mechanism to pay for building the embattled $20.1 billion tunnel, even as it pushes ahead on trying to break ground.