I have a new appreciation for Gotham Central after watching Marvel's Agents of SHIELD because apparently this idea of telling stories about ordinary people investigating things in a superhero universe isn't quite as easy as Rucka and Brubaker made it seem. 
 In this final volume that follows the Major Crime Unit we find out just how hard it is to be a good cop in a bad town with four major stories. In the first, a couple of dirty patrol cops accidentally kill a homeless girl while shaking down a drug dealer, and their story illustrates how the rest of the force holds the MCU in contempt for not being 'real cops', and it also demonstrates that Gotham City often has its own brand of justice. Then a dead young man dressed like Robin kicks off a media firestorm and has one detective's frustrations with Batman boiling over. A tie-in to DC's Infitine Crisis shows how a couple of detective face the potential end of the world. The final story is also the finest as the investigation into corrupt crime scene technician Jim Corrigan takes a devastating toll on Renee Montoya and the rest of the squad. 
 As with the entire run of this series, the characters and crime stories are great comics by themselves and makes the incidents where they have to deal with Batman and super villain shenanigans seem that much more realistic and yet bizarre at the same time. 
 Gotham Central was a critically acclaimed series with lousy sales that only got 40 issues, but from what I've read, DC would have been OK with continuing it. It was the creative team leaving that brought it's run to a close. Based on what the ever reliable Wikipedia is telling me, I'm strangely OK with this because it seems like trying to continue it after the New 52 stuff would have required retconning some key elements, and I wouldn't change a thing. 
 So it gets placed on that same shelf of stories that couldn't get any love while they were being produced only to see their legend grow after they got the ax like Firefly or a Terriers.