Drama City - Softcover

Pelecanos, George P

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316235121 ISBN 13: 9780316235129

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 2013

Synopsis

Lorenzo Brown loves his work. In his job as an officer for the Humane Society, he cruises the city streets, looking for dogs that are being mistreated - underfed, unclean, trained to kill. He takes pride in making their lives better. And that pride helps Lorenzo resist the pull of easier money doing the kind of work that got him a recent prison bid.

Rachel Lopez loves her work, too. By day she is a parole officer, helping people - Lorenzo Brown among them - along a path to responsibility and advancement. At night she heads for the city's hotel bars, where she can always find a man who will let her act out her damage. She loses herself in sex and drink and more.

But Rachel's nights are taking a toll on her days. Lorenzo knows the signs. The trouble is, he truly needs her right now. There's an eruption coming in the streets he left behind, the kind of territorial war that takes down everyone even near it. Lorenzo needs every shred of support he can get to keep from being sucked back into that battleground. He reaches out to Rachel - but she may be too far gone to help either of them.

Writing with the grace and force that have earned him praise as "the poet laureate of the crime world," George Pelecanos has created a novel about two scarred and fallible people who must navigate one of life's most brutal passages. It is an unforgettable, moving, even shocking story that will leave no reader unchanged.

About this title

Review:

Drama City is one of the least gloom-laden of George Pelecanos' excellent thrillers about the underside of Washington DC, not because it lacks his usual high-energy scenes of mayhem and betrayal, but because, for once, there are some vestiges of hope left here. Lorenzo was a gang-banger and went to jail for crimes less serious than some he had committed--now he works as an enforcer for the Humane Society, busting people who mistreat their dogs, and he has genuinely got his life back on track. Rachel Lopez is his probation officer, a good and conscientious public servant, and an alcoholic whose personal life is spinning out of control. Lorenzo's friend Nigel is still in the life--a dealer in drugs and violence; yet even he gets a chance to do the right thing and takes it. This panoramic view of slums and drug dens and dog-fighting pits is as thoroughly peopled as Pelecanos' other books, and makes us invest in those people even more seriously than ever before. This is thriller as social comment and spectacularly intelligent about precisely why drugs still have a hold on people without hope. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

'Top-rate literary crime writer' (THE BOOKSELLER)

'Once again, Pelecanos treads the Washington DC soft shoe shuffle with assurance and pathos. Despairing characters flit across the drug saturated streets of the US capital in a wonderful, if tragic, waltz of despair. ... Pelecanos's view of life has always been bleak and this is no exception, but he displays such a ferocious understanding of street reality and an empathy for America's downtrodden that his books transcend their pulp origin. ... Savour while you can.' (Maxim Jakubowski THE GUARDIAN)

'Few American thirller writers can evoke the jagged rhythms of ghetto life as does George Pelecanos ... un-put-downable.' (Myles McWeeney IRISH INDEPENDENT)

'This had me ducking behind the covers.' (THE MIRROR)

'If you want journalistic realism about inner-city life, not lurid and twisty storytelling, he's your man.' (SUNDAY TIMES)

'...not a conventional thriller. There is no detective, no mystery to solve; it is a novel about crime, its perpetrators and its victims. The picture of life in a Washington DC black ghetto is vivid and harrowing.' (Susanna Yager SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0316235121
• ISBN 13: 9780316235129
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288