George P. Pelecanos_The D.C. Quartet #2-4 (Noir; Hard-Boiled; Crime) EPUB

NB: If anyone has #1 in this series, 'The Big Blowdown', I would really appreciate it. Can't find it anywhere.- felix56



The time is 1976. Captain Beefheart's on the eight-track. The hot new superfly flick King Suckerman is coming to neighborhood theaters. And Washington, D.C., is a hotbed of drugs and racial tension--an easy place to turn a wrong corner and land in a whole lot of trouble.

That's what happens to Marcus Clay and Dimitri Karras when they cross paths with an ex-con and his gang of natural born killers. Walking into a drug deal gone south, Clay and Karras end up with a pile of money that isn't theirs...the sexy teenage girlfriend of the Italian dealer...and major trouble. The ex-con is soon spilling blood to get to the cash. The dealer is scheming to get his girl back. And two knockaround guys named Clay and Karras are reaching a pivotal moment--the time to take a stand, go straight, and get justice. Or maybe just sweet revenge.

In this sizzling thriller, George Pelecanos writes with a firecracker in his prose, shooting sparks on every page and earning his place among the stars of crime fiction.



A bold, brilliant tale of mystery, revenge, and survival in the 1980s, when cocaine and money ruled the city streets and even the good guys wanted a piece of the action.

It's March madness and the college boys are playing basketball on TV. But on the streets of D.C., the homeboys are dealing, dissing, dying. From behind plate glass, with an 80s backbeat pounding in his brain, Marcus Clay watches it all happen, and prays that he can make a go with his downtown record store. Then a car comes careening down U Street, and what Marcus sees next will plunge him into the middle of a war.

A drug runner is decapitated in the crash. A bystander--a white boy desperate to buy a woman's love--snatches a bag of cash from the wreck, and a prince of crime wants it back. For Marcus's buddy, Dimitri Karras, the mayhem is a chance to make a score. For a pair of dirty cops it's a chance to get free. And for dozens of lives swept up into the maelstrom, it's just another springtime in America's capital, where the game is played for keeps.



Several restaurant workers are murdered by a robber, whose brother is killed by police during the chaotic event. As everyone struggles to heal after the incident, the gunman is determined to kill everyone involved in his brother's death.

Amazon.com Review

Penzler Pick, February 2000: Just as Robert B. Parker and Dennis Lehane have made Boston their own and Los Angeles has been the distinct province of a lineage leading from Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald to Michael Connelly and Robert Crais, so is George Pelecanos the storyteller who's put Washington, D.C., on the noir map. Once considered "the best-kept secret in crime fiction" by his peers, he is now fast leaving behind those days of strictly word-of-mouth fame and cult status.

Telling it like he sees it, and looking fearlessly into those dark, forgotten alleyways that lay too far beyond the corridors of power to make it into any guidebooks, Pelecanos conjures up a gritty, ghostly Washington of working-class neighborhoods and aging suburbs and shoots it through with chillingly unpredictable menace. Most Washington natives probably wouldn't recognize the place--but they couldn't stop trying either, knowing that they've at least glimpsed (out of the corners of their eyes) those environs where a Pelecanos character is most at home.

In Shame the Devil, we find a society of grieving men and women connected by loss, betrayal, the need for revenge, and the shadowy presence of evil. As in other Pelecanos tales, the heroes are not easily identified, love is a coming together of wounded souls, and answers are found where least expected. In the aftermath of a botched armed robbery, a fair number of lives have been thrown into a downward spiral. The problems, however, come on faster and with more fury once the status quo sustaining the survivors has been breached by an ill-wishing and unwanted addition to their little group.

Here are two favorite moments. In one, protagonist Dimitri Karras asks the name of a fellow bar patron. Hearing that he's called Happy, Karras comments that he doesn't look too happy. The answer: "He's pacing himself." The other: we hear the thoughts of the sociopathic villain: "Some believed that incarceration was a mark of failure, but Frank disagreed. Prison was an essential element of any career criminal's education."

With Shame the Devil, Pelecanos solidifies his position among the elite of the brilliant coterie of young noir writers who are creating the emerging classics of the genre. --Otto Penzler