Showing results by author "George Pelecanos" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Gus Ramone is "good police", a former Internal Affairs investigator now working homicide for the city's Violent Crime branch. His new case involves the death of a local teenager named Asa whose body has been found in a local community garden.

After the Carusos family home is destroyed by police with a no-knock warrant, the family struggle to return to normal. Two former inmates reunite on a TV set. They're both back on the straight and narrow...until one sees the potential for an easy grift. A teenage boy must step into the man he'd like to be as a hostage crisis grips his hometown. A woman adrift meets a man tied to her grandmother's past, and awakens to the bloody history of the place she grew up. Pelecanos' portraits are characterized by shades of grey, resisting the mold victims and perpetrators, good and evil.

Lorenzo Brown loves his work. As an officer for the Humane Society, it is his job to cruise 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.

Anna Byrne is a jailhouse librarian. In a place where hope is hard to find, the power of books can be a light in the dark. For some of the prisoners, her work is life-changing. Like Michael Hudson, her best student, who's been locked up awaiting trial before his sudden release. He's relieved to be free - to 'come uptown', as they say - but can't shake the question: why is the witness who put him behind bars suddenly refusing to testify? There's a man who might have the answer, but he wants something first.

In the summer of 1976, the nation's capital is gearing up for the Bicentennial. Captain Beefheart's on the eight-track, and the hot new film "King Suckerman" has everyone talking. Two knockaround guys named Clay and Karras are out looking for trouble when they stumble onto a drug deal gone bad and end up with a pile of money that isn't theirs. When the well-armed dealer starts spilling blood to get to the cash, Clay and Karras must take a stand, go straight, and get justice -or maybe just sweet revenge.

Christopher Flynn is trying to get it right. After years of trouble and rebellion that enraged his father and nearly cost him his life, he has a steady job in his father's company, he's seriously dating a woman he respects, and, aside from the distrust that lingers in his father's eyes, his mistakes are firmly in the past. One day on the job, Chris and his partner come across a temptation almost too big to resist. Chris does the right thing, but old habits and instincts rise to the surface, threatening this newfound stability with sudden treachery and violence.

Mystery sensation Pelecanos pens the lead story and edits this groundbreaking collection of stories detailing the seedy underside of the nation's capital. This is not an anthology of ill-conceived and inauthentic political thrillers. Instead, in D.C. Noir, pimps, whores, gangsters, and con-men run rampant in zones of this city that most never hear about.

It's March madness and the college boys are playing basketball on T.V. 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.

Hidden beneath the floorboards in a house he's remodelling, Christopher Flynn discovers something very tempting - and troubling. Summoning every bit of maturity and every lesson he's learned the hard way, Chris leaves what he found where he found it and tells his job partner to forget it, too. Knowing trouble when he sees it - and walking the other way-is a habit Chris is still learning. Chris's father, Thomas Flynn, runs the family business where Chris and his friends have found work.