The Sweet Forever

August 3, 1998
Pelecanos (King Suckerman) lays a fair claim to be the Zola of Washington, D.C. The latest of his thrillers, which use a recurring cast of ordinary Washingtonians to chronicle the city's decline since WWII, brings us to 1986, when Vietnam vet Marcus Clay, founder of ("African American Owned and Operated") Real Right Records, and his employee and best friend, aging Greek-American cokehead Dmitri Karras, witness a grisly car accident outside Clay's newest record shop on the struggling U Street strip. A suburbanite, in town to score blow from Karras, steals $25,000 in drug money from the car and inadvertently starts a race between local hoods and dirty cops--to get the money back and avenge the theft--that jeopardizes the neighborhood's fragile peace. As always, the intertwined fates of black and white Washington inform the fates of Pelecanos's individual characters, and if he cooks up saccharine subplots for his protagonists, the city's large and small tragedies--its crack epidemic, the overdose of local hero Len Bias, the disgrace of home rule, the withering of D.C.'s last independent music scenes, the ugly segregation of the place--cut the sweetness and haunt the compelling main plot from beginning to end. With characters for whom the White House is just a tourist attraction, Pelecanos is that rare bird among Washington novelists, a writer who loves and knows the city he writes about.

April 15, 1998
Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay, first featured in Pelecanos's juicy King Suckerman (LJ 8/97), are law-abiding citizens of the ghetto, but in this sequel, Dimitri struggles with a cocaine habit--and the temptation to pick up some easy cash.

Starred review from December 1, 1998
In his masterful "King Suckerman", Pelecanos used the days preceding the U.S. bicentennial celebration in Washington, D.C., to frame a surprisingly complex homage to the era of blaxploitation films. Now, in this somber story of wasted lives, set nearly 10 years later and again starring record-store owner Marcus Clay and his friend Dimitri Karras, the action unfolds against the backdrop of the 1986 NCAA basketball play-offs, the last hurrah for Maryland star Len Bias, who died of a crack overdose two days after being selected in the first round of the NBA player draft. As Clay and Karras, the latter sporting his own cocaine problem, follow Maryland's fortunes through the play-offs, they find themselves on the periphery of a drug war, set off when a paper bag full of cash is stolen from a burning car in front of Clay's record shop. It's common to clutter the scenery in a period mystery with identifiable brand-names from the era, but Pelecanos goes several steps further: his evocation of Washington's inner city in the '80s--the music, cars, clothes, attitudes--serves as an effective entree into the troubled heads and hearts of his characters, whether scared kids posing as gang soldiers or a black record-store owner and his Greek buddy dodging the bullets of daily life. The real drama in this near-perfect urban tragedy comes not in the blood-splattered shootout between rogue cops and cornered drug-dealers but in the soul-wearying struggle of Pelecanos' people to avoid being engulfed by the waste that surrounds them. ((Reviewed June 1 & 15, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)