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Title: Hell to Pay by George P. Pelecanos, George Pelecanos ISBN: 0-446-61132-8 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: March, 2003 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.27 (26 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Taut gritty urban investigative tale
Comment: Working for the Aiding Prostitutes in Peril non-profit organization, Montgomery County sleuths Karen Bagley and Sue Tracey specialize in locating teenage runaways. They hire DC private detective Derek Strange to help them with cases in the District. After proving his worth to his retainers, Derek and his partner Terry Quinn are sent to bring in fourteen-year-old Germantown runaway Jennifer from the cold mean streets of the city.
While Terry works the child prostitution case, Derek has a more personal vendetta to handle. Someone(s) killed the quarterback of the Pee Wee football team that Derek coaches while the kid was at an ice cream stand. At the same time Derek anguishes over the lad's murder, his longtime lover is all over him for his frequent visits to the massage parlor.
No one describes the neighborhoods of Washington DC better than George Pelecanos who take his audience on quite a vivid tour of the other side of Washington. The two subplots are well written and exciting, but the action is the streets of the city, homicide hot even on a wintry night. The characters are believable and make the story line sing while augmenting Mr. Pelecanos tour guide of the nation's capital. Fans of gritty urban investigative tales will want to read HELL TO PAY and its predecessor RIGHT AS RAIN because these are some of the best the sub-genre offer.
Harriet Klausner
Rating: 5
Summary: Another Gritty Thriller
Comment: In this realistic and thought- provoking crime story set in the poor violent section of Washington D.C., Derek Strange, who owns and operates a private investigator business, is hired by two women investigators who have been working with APIP (Aiding Prostitutes In Peril). They hire Strange to help find a john who has been acting weird and talking about rough sex. He is also hired to follow a friend's daughter and the man she is dating. His friend Quinn becomes involved with one of the women investigators and helps Strange coach a Youth football team. His interactions with the team add depth to the characters and provides the setting, situation and relationships for the main action of the story. The innocence of youth football is juxtoposed within The Culture of Violence found in inner cities. Pelecanos intentionally uses Washington D.C. which is ironically just miles from the seat of government of the most powerful nation in the world.
HELL TO PAY made me angry and pulled at my heartstrings. It is written so descriptively that it feels real; it takes the reader to the projects and portrays and examines the effect of a young innocent victim's death on everyone else in the story. The story also describes racism and illustrates how kids grow up fast, are exposed to violence, drugs, and fear. Strange, who wants to find the killer before the police, struggles with his own beliefs and values. HELL TO PAY will transport most readers to where they've never been. It's worth the trip!
Rating: 5
Summary: In the End We Find Redemption and Hope
Comment: Derek Strange is a tough but sensitive black private eye with his own agency, an honorable ex-cop somewhere in his middle fifties, who prides himself on being a role model for his neighborhood. His partner in the agency is the hot-tempered, white ex-cop Terry Quinn.
Strange is working a background check on a young man who is engaged to a friend's daughter. Also a couple of crusading young female ex-cops, who specialize in locating minors, hire them to help liberate an underage prostitute named Jennifer Marshall from the clutches of a pimp named Worldwide Wilson.
Strange is coaching a peewee football team of poor kids with the help of a couple of fathers, a couple of cops and Quinn. As Quinn tangles with Wilson, three young thugs begin to linger at the fringes of football practice. Are they there because of Strange's investigation? Then one of the stars on Strange's football team is killed in a drive by. Strange and Quinn set out to find the killers and their investigation leads them deep inside the city's labyrinth of crime and to the very lethal Worldwide Wilson.
Strange and Quinn are assailed on all sides by young, gun toting players in the drug trade, who demand respect at the point of a gun. Strange deplores the way these kids act, trying to prove they are real men, backing it up with their guns, and he longs for a time in the nation's capital that he has idealized from his youth.
For all its violence and its portrait of what's wrong with parts of our society, and despite the emotional ride you'll go on in this story, this book is strangely not depressing. It's actually a story of moral accountability, redemption and hope and I can't recommend it highly enough.
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Title: Right As Rain by George P. Pelecanos ISBN: 0446610798 Publisher: Warner Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Soul Circus by George P. Pelecanos ISBN: 0316608432 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Sweet Forever by George P. Pelecanos ISBN: 044023493X Publisher: Dell Pub. Date: 10 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Shame the Devil by George P. Pelecanos ISBN: 0440236355 Publisher: Dell Pub. Date: 06 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Big Blowdown by George P. Pelecanos ISBN: 0312242913 Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur Pub. Date: 24 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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