Another great book in the DC Quartet. At some point, while listening to the audio version, I was driving down U street while the story took place on the same street. Local flair is everywhere!

I've heard a lot of good things about Pelecanos and so I was eager to read some of his work. This one has a pretty good reputation, high ratings etc. so I expected big things. I don't think it managed to live up to the hype.

Perhaps if I hadn't seen The Wire the imagery used and the life portrayed within it's pages would have been that much more powerful, however as it is I felt that they took the ideas put forward in this book and went further, deeper and generally made the show pack more of a punch than Pelecanos could squeeze in to these pages.

There were some interesting characters to get to know, despite what seemed like a new character being intoduced every chpater and from what I've read they're all from the novels written prior to this one. SOmething to look out for fer sure.

Aside from the constant ramblings about basketball (a sport I care very little for) this was a tightly written, entertaining, urban drama dealing with aspects of society that in general we wish we could avoid; drugs, guns, poverty and violence are all portrayed without glamour and in a quite visceral manner.

Not as good as I was hoping but I'll definitely give him another shot.

Too dramatic and 80s slang hasn't aged well.

I read this book a couple of days, which is fast for me. It really drew me along, though i did skim the last, winding-down chapter. So why only two stars? There were a couple of stylistic things that started to bother me: mainly, the constant musical references. Hardly a page passed without the title of a song, and the name of the artist, being cited. Sometimes there'd be comments about the musicians, too. They felt arbitrary after a while, and like something extraneous intruding on the narrative. It felt like i had to stop paying attention to the story and dig through my memory banks to recall that Cameo song, and once i'd recalled it, it would bring up memories completely unrelated to the world and themes of the novel (like, with Cameo, for some reason i think of an old optomitrist's office; was it on the radio there? i don't know).

I picked this up b/c i knew the author was a writer for "The Wire" on HBO. I'd listened to one of his commentaries on Season 3.

The third book in the author's DC quartet and just as good as the previous two. The dark, gritty crime story was lightened a bit by all the pop culture references and I actually knew most of the music ones for once.

A drug runner's car crashes outside of Marcus Clay's record store and someone steals a bag of money out of the back of the car as it burns. Will the stolen bag of money destroy all that Marcus Clay has worked to build?

The third book in George Peleanos' DC Quartet catches up with Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay in the 1980s, years after the events of King Suckerman. Marcus now owns a chain of record stores and Dimitri owns an impressive cocaine habit. Complicating matters are a pair of crooked cops, a local crime lord named Tyrell Cleveland and his goons.

Tension slowly builds in this one as Karras sinks deeper into addiction, one of the crooked cops grows a conscience, and the stolen money seems to be the cause of all the troubles in the world. In addition to music, Basketball plays a big part in this book, notably Len Bias, who would die of a cocaine overdose after being drafted before ever playing for the Celtic, an event I remember from when I was a kid.

Nods to other works in the Pelecanos-verse abound, notably appearances by both Big Nick Stefanos and his grandson, Nick, who is still married and has just begun his self-destructive ways.

Without giving away too much, this one ends with one of the best gunfights in crime fiction, right up there with Matthew Scudder and Mick Ballou taking down the bad guys in [b:Everybody Dies|1344364|Everybody Dies|Matt Scudder|/assets/nocover/60x80.png|1333964]. 4.5 stars.

Another solid crime thriller by Pelecanos, the third in his D.C. Quartet series.

Ten years after the violent bicentennial events in King Suckerman, trouble comes right to the door of Marcus Clay's record store. A gangster's car speeds out of control, swerving around the Green Line Metro construction on U Street, and crashes in a fiery wreck, with a pillowcase of drug money going missing in the chaos. Pelecanos lays out the consequences with his usual sure hand. The characters--both returning and new--are drawn with nice details, and the plot never stalls or feels overly determined. And, as usual, the buildup to the climax is utterly riveting.

As in previous books, Pelecanos layers on period details, mostly for the better. It's fun to look at an almost heightened portrait of the 80s music scene, where all in one night, you have Black Flag playing a school auditorium, Echo and the Bunnymen at GWU, Chuck Brown playing go-go at the Masonic Temple (now a CVS where I occasionally buy the paper), and Gil Scott-Heron at a small club uptown. On the other hand, you've got characters quoting "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" to one another, perhaps telling the reader "IT'S THE 80s" in a way that's a bit too on the nose.

Sentimentality again crops up, especially in an impromptu speech about the coming crack epidemic where Clay actually says, "We're all to blame. 'Cause in the end, years from now when it's way too late, we're gonna see we did nothin' to stop all this. We were so busy makin' money, ignorin' the ones who needed help, lookin' out for ourselves. So busy lookin' the other way." All of this is true (and who wouldn't be moved to a speech like this faced with the prospect of Marion Barry's reelection in a city quickly going to hell?), but it feels too much like a writer placing his words in the past than an actual character speaking his mind.

To his credit, though, Pelecanos then has Clay's best friend reply, "Yeah, well, what're you gonna do?"

Which sums up Pelecanos's novels nicely. The world is going to hell. May as well see it through clear eyes and try to get along best you can.

Great in the first half but goddamn does it get preachy, which I just can't stand much anymore in fiction.

This book made it really obvious I need to re-evaluate my relationship with crime fiction / hardboiled noir, even as escapist fare. I've long been a huge fan of The Wire, and will maintain that Pelecanos and David Simon did a terrific job writing nuance and inevitability and tragedy and joy into that set of characters. I loved The Wire so much I took a class on it in college (shout-out to Shawn Peters at UW-Madison) which stressed the social contract, assigned Paul Butler as reading, and was responsible for opening my eyes to a lot what's wrong with America's relationship with crime and policing and incarceration.

The Sweet Forever, set in DC around Len Bias' run in the tournament with Maryland in 1986 preceding his untimely cocaine overdose, is pretty quintessential crime fiction. It is laden with unceasing sexist descriptions of all of its one-dimensional female characters, every description of every woman in the novel made me recoil a bit and every character existed to inform the character of the main they were there to round out. The remaining characters are either racist stereotypes or vessels for hit-you-over-the-head moralizing. Everyone is abusing drugs and alcohol the entire time. Typical noir stuff.

Otherwise, the book was pretty good! A decent plot with high stakes that is tied up a little too neatly, but I get the appeal. Nevertheless, I think conscientious readers need to reevaluate this generation of crime fiction and potentially leave it behind. There are plenty of new standard-bearers to welcome in who recognize the humanity of all of their characters (I'm looking forward to Ryan Gattis' new novel later this year, for instance).