Hell to Pay

Starred review from December 10, 2001
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.

October 15, 2001
Remember Derek Strange and Terry Quinn from Right as Rain? They're back again, trying to track down a suburban teenager who is apparently working in Washington, DC, as a prostitute. The 20-city author tour means that the publisher is taking this book very seriously.

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2001
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)