FICTION
Released: Aug. 29, 2011
"Another tough, heart-rending odyssey through a war zone in which every denizen has the potential to be both hero and villain."
Pelecanos' newest hero walks the mean streets of the Nation's Capital with all the piercing hopes and fears and personal baggage of the others (
The Way Home, 2009, etc.).
Read full book review >
FICTION
Released: Feb. 1, 2006
"Mostly, though, the bleak carnival of street crime goes hand in hand with a worldview so deterministic you'd swear nothing could ever change."
According to these 16 new stories, life in the nation's capital ranks with afterlife in the lower circles of hell.
Read full book review >
FICTION
Released: March 22, 2005
"The dog-eat-dog metaphor, borrowed perhaps from the film Amores Perros, provides a brutal, tender new way for Pelecanos to get at his great subject: the miraculous survival of lilies among the toxic weeds of the Nation's Capital. "
Pelecanos takes a break from the continuing sagas of DC cop Derek Strange (
Hard Revolution, 2003, etc.) and DC private eye Nick Stefanos (
Shame the Devil, 2000, etc.) for an equally unsparing stand-alone tale of two cops who aren't quite cops.
Read full book review >
FICTION
Released: March 9, 2004
"The most conventionally ambitious of Pelecanos's sprawling studies of D.C. crime: pat in its sociological determinism, harrowing in its portraits of each hopeless loser and the few ex-losers who escape."
Pelecanos's latest Extra Dark slice of Washington street crime leaps back a generation to connect the backstory of private eye Derek Strange (
Soul Circus, 2003, etc.) to the murder of Martin Luther King.
Read full book review >
FICTION
Released: Feb. 27, 2002
"Despite all the scenes illustrating the hopelessness of growing up in the nation's capital, the author's ardent muckraking makes his tenth novel his most hopeful, even though it takes the edge off his trademark grasp of urban evil."
A drive-by shooting that ordinarily wouldn't even rate the front page of the
Washington Post Metro section pits p.i. Derek Strange (
Right as Rain, 2001) against a city full of men behaving badly.
Read full book review >
FICTION
Released: Aug. 8, 2006
"The best American comparison, in fact, is James Lee Burke, who also keeps writing the same churning book over and over and clearly hates to come to the last page just as much as Pelecanos."
You can take Pelecanos out of his two DC series starring Nick Stefanos (
Shame the Devil, 2000, etc.) and Derek Strange (
Hard Revolution, 2004, etc.), but you can't take the impulse to turn District crime into a serial epic out of Pelecanos.
Read full book review >
