George Pelecanos_ Nick Stefanos #1-#3 (EPUB+MOBI)

Thirty something Nick Stefanos, up-from-the-sales-floor ad manager at a Washington, D.C., electronics chain, has quit smoking and considerably reduced his drug intake but still drinks pretty heavily. When the grandfather of Jimmy Broda, a stockboy Nick has befriended, asks him to help find the missing boy, Nick reluctantly agrees. Jimmy has been hanging out with skinheads and Nick begins plumbing that world after he's fired from his job. With time and severance pay on his hands he follows Jimmy's trail to the resorts of the Carolina Outer Banks, moving back to Washington to unravel a plot that involves drugs, violence and murder.



Pelecanos’ newest hero walks the mean streets of the Nation’s Capital with all the piercing hopes and fears and personal baggage of the others (The Way Home, 2009, etc.).

Jailed drug dealer Anwan Hawkins, pleased with the way Spero Lucas’ brisk investigative work for attorney Tom Petersen gets his teenaged son David sprung on charges of car theft and worse, asks him to take on a private recovery job. The item in question is three shoeboxes of marijuana pinched from three D.C. doorsteps where Hawkins had asked FedEx to deliver them on the assumption that his couriers would beat the absent homeowners to the pickup. The finder’s fee is 40 percent. The gig smells rotten, but no more rotten than most of what Lucas has done since his stint with the Marines in Iraq. The couriers, Tavon Lynch and Edwin Davis, have nothing to tell Lucas. Nor do most of the neighbors who might have seen who swiped the merchandise. His only hope is Ernest Lindsay, a potential witness who’s a student in Lucas’ brother Leo’s English class at Cardozo High. But Lucas is reluctant to involve Ernest in a case that promises the involvement of bent police officers and hired killers, especially after somebody pops the two couriers. It’s obvious to the reader, if not to Lucas, who pulled the trigger, but not why. And before Lucas learns that, he’ll have to confront the exceptional difficulty of acting the white knight in a world in which, as a deeply compromised cop reminds him, “we all got dirt on us.”

Another tough, heart-rending odyssey through a war zone in which every denizen has the potential to be both hero and villain.



Welcome to the unlit bleakness of grunge crime fiction. Nick Stefanos (Nick's Trip) inhabits D.C.'s most squalid streets, tending bar, boozing for free, wasting his 30s and dating a girl with a taste for the sauce to rival his. One night, out on a bender and nearly passed out, he hears a murder being committed and decides to find the killers (how a guy this hammered can later remember so much is cheerfully glossed over). Nick gets himself an alarmingly straight-arrow partner and dives headlong into the underbelly of the porn trade. Two young black men have been dealing drugs and selling their bodies; one is dead, and the other is missing. Stefanos only pauses to drink, listen to music by bands with whom only the hippest readers will be familiar and have a few bouts of desperate sex. Although his innumerable descriptions of bars and boozing might leave some bored (or queasy), Pelecanos joins company with James Ellroy, Andrew Vachss and Jack O' Connell in extending the noirest tones of crime fiction. Here, he unleashes a lacerating view of urban angst and degradation.