Drama City

February 21, 2005
Pelecanos's later fiction, set on the drug-saturated streets of ghetto Washington, D.C., is charged with the dark, unrelenting inevitability of Greek myth. In the author's 13th novel, "dog man" Lorenzo Brown, a street investigator for the Humane Society, has recently completed an eight-year stretch in prison for narcotics and is determined to stay clean and free. Rachel Lopez, Lorenzo's parole officer, spends her days chasing down clients and her nights getting drunk in bars and having rough sex with strangers. The ignition point for the violence that eventually engulfs these two fully realized, attractive characters—characteristics that in Pelecanos's world mark them as quite probably doomed—is a minor argument between local drug kingpins that inflates into a series of revenge killings. Pelecanos is known for his bleak, uncompromising outlook (Hard Resolution
; Hell to Pay
; The Sweet Forever
) and while the death and destruction are still here in full force, some fans may question the turnaround in his ending. Might it be an attempt to hit the megabestseller stardom that fans think he deserves? Hope and redemption are fine subjects for many novelists, but it's the stark world of violence and despair that this author really owns. Agent, Sloan Harris at ICM. 7-city author tour.

November 15, 2004
Paroled Lorenzo Brown, now working for the Humane Society, finds it hard to stay on the straight and narrow when a killer strikes close to home. With a seven-city author tour.

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2005
Pelecanos continues to expand the parameters of crime fiction by focusing not on a particular crime or, in this case, not even on a particular crime solver. His real subject is the streets themselves: the nature of daily life in an American inner city--the potent mixture of resolve, weakness, violence, and love that percolates in Washington, D.C.'s roughest neighborhoods, where obstacles far outnumber opportunities. Lorenzo Brown, an ex-con determined to stay straight, works for the Humane Society, rescuing abused animals. Rachel Lopez, Brown's probation officer, works the same streets, tracking her "offenders" and encouraging them to avoid further offenses. Employing a kind of days-in-the-lives narrative strategy, Pelecanos follows Brown and Lopez on their daily rounds as they intersect in different ways with members of two rival drug gangs. Inevitably, the gang and straight worlds collide, forcing Brown to choose between his need for revenge and his commitment to a new life. What Pelecanos does best is to expose the vulnerabilities of his characters, the parts of themselves they hide from the world. It might be Lopez, asserting control over men in bars to mask the lack of control she feels on the streets, or it might be a gang soldier dreaming of seeing Paris ("All's he needed was one of them passports, buy a plane ticket, and go. But how did you get a passport? How did you buy a plane ticket?"). Though set on the same streets as Pelecanos' earlier books, this novel works on a smaller scale, lingering on the everyday, "the smiling faces and sad, all kinds of faces in between." It's not a view we see much in genre fiction, making it all the more welcome.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)