Hell to Pay [Hardcover]

In Hell to Pay, Washington, D.C., is just one more thug in an endless list of thugs who brutalize the poor, the weak, and the young. The primary victim this time is a rising star on Derek Strange's Pee Wee football team. In this city where making T-shirts for bereaved families of young murder victims is a full-time business, the boy is an accidental victim in a war between drug dealers and lowlifes.

Private investigator Strange, in his second George Pelecanos outing (after 2001's Right as Rain), has seen enough of this face of D.C. His relationship to his secretary/lover Janine sputters in the wake of increasing, irrational infidelities. His moral compass swings wildly as he tracks the killers, Garfield "Death" Potter and friends. Not knowing if he can be satisfied seeing these men in prison, Strange contemplates other brands of "justice."

For fans of Pelecanos, all the usual trappings are here: the hyper-real dialogue, the bloody street fights, the immersion in classic R&B, and the most current music on the streets. Pelecanos does stumble in a few places. His narrative becomes wooden at times, and his plot features a couple of glaring coincidences (e.g., Strange just happens to jot down the license plate of a car that later turns out to be the one driven by the murderers). But Pelecanos is the real deal in noir. If Dennis Lehane owns Boston and Michael Connelly is master of L.A., Pelecanos is dark D.C.'s intimate chronicler. --Patrick O'Kelley

You know you're in Pelecanos country when the music begins early a trio of street thugs on their way to a dogfight listen to "the new DMX joint on PGC, turned up loud" and continues to throb all the way through this second book in the author's hardboiled and heartbreaking series centered around Washington, D.C., private detective Derek Strange. A black man in his 50s, Strange first notices these particular thugs when they hang out around a Pee Wee football team he is coaching. Their appearance comes to seem more sinister in retrospect, when Strange's nine-year-old star quarterback is shot and killed at an ice cream stand. While Strange hunts for the men who shot the boy, his partner, Terry Quinn, an Irish Catholic ex-cop, gets pulled into an attempt to save a young runaway turned prostitute from a big-time pimp and falls for one of the tough women organizing the rescue. Meanwhile, Strange goes through a rocky period with his longtime lover (and secretary) Janine, forced to consider what his massage-parlor habit is doing to their relationship. The novel's turf the nontourist parts of Washington, D.C., neighborhoods where so many young black children die that selling T-shirts with their pictures on them at their wakes and funerals has become a cottage industry was staked out successfully in Pelecanos's earlier books about the sons and grandsons of Greek immigrants and now is extended to focus chiefly on the District's black majority. It is Pelecanos's intimate understanding of this volatile D.C. and the complexity of Strange a rich, sometimes frustrating but always warmly human character that should keep this series fresh for a long time to come. (Feb. 19)Forecast: Little, Brown is betting $100,000 in marketing dollars (not to mention a 20-city author tour) that this will be the book that propels cult favorite Pelecanos onto the bestseller lists and they may be right. Few writers deserve a boost as much as the hardworking, fearlessly gritty and engagingly idiosyncratic Pelecanos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Having debuted in Right as Rain, the interracial private investigator team of Derek Strange and Terry Quinn here returns to the mean streets of Washington, DC. African American Strange, the older and wiser or at least more experienced of the duo, is initially contacted by some police officers who want him and Quinn to find a teen runaway working as a prostitute. They accept the job, while Strange simultaneously examines the background of the flashy fiance of a friend's daughter. Also a coach at an after-school football league, Strange finds that his investigations impact his team, and he is made painfully aware of the precarious lives of DC's black youth, too often victims of sudden violence. As always, Pelecanos handles the infrequent bouts of brutal action expertly, but the heart of the book resides in the conversations about music, race, and life that occur in the local streets, restaurants, and bars. Pelecanos's growing body of fans won't be disappointed, and Hell To Pay just might attract new readers who enjoy gritty urban tales of the type featured on the late, lamented TV series Homicide. For all larger public libraries.
- Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* Following last year's superb Right as Rain [BKL D 15 00], Pelecanos continues his new Derek Strange-Terry Quinn series with another gripping exploration of life on Washington, D.C.'s inner-city streets. Building on the friendship formed in the earlier book, Quinn is now working part-time for Strange's detective agency and helping him coach a Pewee League football team. When one of the players is murdered in a drive-by shooting, Strange looks for the killer, driven by personal as well as professional motives. Similarly, Quinn helps a client reclaim a teenager from the streets, only to find himself in a personal vendetta with her pimp, who speciazlies in "turning out" underage runaways. Juggling subplots and supporting characters with remarkable dexterity, Pelecanos moves from rich and surprisingly sympathetic portraits of the drive-by shooters to multifaceted depictions of Strange's and Quinn's romantic relationships. It was Pelecanos' graphic hard-boiled style and unflinching noir sensibility that established his cult reputation, but as his work matures, it becomes increasingly clear that the range of his talent is far greater than that characterization implies. His grasp of the subtleties of human relationships is the equal of the best nongenre writers, and his ability to build characters of substance and complexity is equally impressive. And, most visibly in this series, he writes about race--as in the relationship between African American Strange and Irish Catholic Quinn--with both sensitivity and courage. Pelecanos is clearly working at the top of his game, and his novels belong in the hands of anyone who cares about contemporary realistic fiction. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"...looks like his long overdue big-league breakthrough... a suspenseful, unusually cinematic thriller..." -- New York Times, 2/21/02

Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, the team of private investigators who made their stunning debut in Right As Rain, are hired to find a 14-year-old white girl from the suburbs who's run away from home and is now working as a prostitute. The two ex-cops think they know D.C.'s dangers, but nothing in their experience has prepared them for Worldwide Wilson, the pimp whose territory they're intruding upon.

Combining inimitable neighborhood flavor, action scenes that rank among the best in fiction, and a clear-eyed view of morality in a world with few rules, "Hell to Pay" is another Pelecanos masterpiece for his ever-expanding audience to savor.

George P. Pelecanos is the author of nine richly praised crime novels set in and around Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife and children. Several of his novels have been sold for film.

"Death" and "Coon" and "Worldwide Wilson" are the street names of bad guys in this mystery thriller set in Washington, D.C.'s, worst neighborhoods. Two private investigators--one white and one black--go deep and try to draw the line between what's evil, and what just happens in the 'hood. Do good men visit whores? Yes. Coach Pee Wee football? Yes. Sell drugs? Maybe. Richard Allen talks the talk splendidly when he's a dude. He can't render children's voices at all, and probably shouldn't have tried, but it doesn't matter terribly. Poverty is a man's game, even if you are a boy. This excellent book is dedicated to Dennis Ashton, Jr., a 7-year-old shot to death by a criminal with a handgun in 1977. B.H.C. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.