The other stories all strike sparks as reminiscences of troubled youth recalled from the perspective of adult experience—or...
Seven stories and a novella from the undisputed king of D.C. noir.
Pelecanos, who made his mark as a guide to the lower depths of the nation’s capital and a writer/producer of the acclaimed TV series The Wire, has been as resourceful and inventive as his heroes, and this collection showcases his versatility. In the first and best of the stories, “The Confidential Informant,” a street-wise kid’s scheme to claim a $1,000 reward, set forth in scorching, slangy first-person, backfires fatally. “Chosen” chronicles the very mixed fortunes of an adoptive family whose youngest child is Spero Lucas (The Double, 2013, etc.). “String Music” toggles back and forth between Tonio Harris, who's struggling to survive against an enemy he impulsively insulted, and Sgt. Peters, who’s struggling just as hard to protect him. “When You’re Hungry” shows a kid who escaped an impoverished background to become a crack insurance investigator sent to Brazil, where an alleged murder victim has been sighted, that there’s always somebody hungrier than him. A kid who’s dealing acquiesces in his childhood friend’s murder but still feels bad for the friend’s mother in “Miss Mary’s Room.” The narrator of “Plastic Paddy” recalls the dangers and dead ends he encountered in smoking dope with a faux-Irish friend destined for a “long fall.” In “The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us,” a young man who works under Pelecanos regular Nick Stefanos avenges a friend who tried to organize his fellow hotel employees, then wonders whether another employee who saw him on the scene will turn him in. The only real disappointment is the title novella, in which a TV writer/producer who sounds a lot like the author tracks down the men who killed his gaffer, an amiable doper, and sets them up for condign justice.
The other stories all strike sparks as reminiscences of troubled youth recalled from the perspective of adult experience—or from beyond the grave.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-28437-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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