George P. Pelecanos Books In Order

Nick Stefanos Books In Publication Order

  1. A Firing Offense (1992)
  2. Nick’s Trip (1993)
  3. Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go (1995)

D.C. Quartet Books In Publication Order

  1. The Big Blowdown (1996)
  2. King Suckerman (1997)
  3. The Sweet Forever (1998)
  4. Shame the Devil (2000)

Derek Strange & Terry Quinn Books In Publication Order

  1. Right as Rain (2001)
  2. Hell to Pay (2002)
  3. Soul Circus (2003)
  4. Hard Revolution (2004)
  5. What It Was (2012)

Spero Lucas Books In Publication Order

  1. The Cut (2011)
  2. The Double (2013)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Shoedog (1994)
  2. Drama City (2005)
  3. The Night Gardener (2006)
  4. The Turnaround (2008)
  5. The Way Home (2009)
  6. The Man Who Came Uptown (2018)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Martini Shot (2015)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. D.C. Noir (2005)
  2. D.C. Noir 2 (2008)
  3. The Best American Mystery Stories 2008 (2008)
  4. The Highway Kind (2016)

Nick Stefanos Book Covers

D.C. Quartet Book Covers

Derek Strange & Terry Quinn Book Covers

Spero Lucas Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

George P. Pelecanos Books Overview

A Firing Offense

As the advertising director of Nutty Nathan’s, Nick Stefanos knows all the tricks of the electronics business. Blow out sales and shady deals were his life. When one of the stockboys disappears, it’s not news: just another metalhead who went off chasing some dream of big money and easy living. But the kid reminded Nick of himself twelve years ago: an angry punk hooked on speed metal and the fast life. So when the boy’s grandfather begs Nick to find the kid, Nick says he’ll try. A Firing Offense, Nick Stefanos’ debut, shows why, as Barry Gifford puts it, ‘To miss out on Pelecanos would be criminal.’

Nick’s Trip

The second title in the Nick Stefanos series. Pelecanos is hot.

Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go

‘You have already been a punk. Least you can do is go out like a man’; then a dull popping sound and a quiet splash. That’s how Nick Stefanos gets drawn into the murder of Calvin Jeter, an investigation that takes him through the roughest part of the nation’s capital and the blackest parts of the human soul. ‘Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go‘ is the third volume in the ‘Nick Stefanos’ series which establishes George P. Pelecanos as the rightful heir to the noir tradition of James Cain, David Goodis and Jim Thompson.

The Big Blowdown

For Joey Recevo and Pete Karras, two kids from one of Washington’s rougher neighborhoods, the easiest work to find after the War is all criminal providing a little muscle for a local boss. But Karris is soft on his fellow immigrants, and the boss can’t let his mob get soft, so one of his boys gives Karras a painful lesson. Three years later, it’s the same mob that figures big Nick Stefanos’s grill needs protection and this decision will once again bring Joey and Pete face to face. In this final confrontation, the two of them will find the meaning of friendship, the heart of honor, and the cost of both. Powerfully told, elegantly wrought, The Big Blowdown is a knockout.

King Suckerman

The time is 1976. Captain Beefheart’s on the eight track. The hot new superfly flick King Suckerman is coming to neighborhood theaters. And Washington, D.C., is a hotbed of drugs and racial tension an easy place to turn a wrong corner and land in a whole lot of trouble. That’s what happens to Marcus Clay and Dimitri Karras when they cross paths with an ex con and his gang of natural born killers. Walking into a drug deal gone south, Clay and Karras end up with a pile of money that isn’t theirs…
the sexy teenage girlfriend of the Italian dealer…
and major trouble. The ex con is soon spilling blood to get to the cash. The dealer is scheming to get his girl back. And two knockaround guys named Clay and Karras are reaching a pivotal moment the time to take a stand, go straight, and get justice. Or maybe just sweet revenge. In this sizzling thriller, George Pelecanos writes with a firecracker in his prose, shooting sparks on every page and earning his place among the stars of crime fiction.

The Sweet Forever

It’s March madness. And the college boys are playing basketball on TV. 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…
. For Marcus’s buddy, Dimitri Karras, the mayhem is a chance to make a score. For a pair of dirty cops it’s a chance to get free. And for dozens of lives swept up into the maelstrom, it’s just another springtime in America’s capital, where the game is played for keeps…

Shame the Devil

The boys are back in townFrank Farrow is a natural born killer. Roman Otis is a fine looking crooner who does his killing on the side. On a hot D.C. afternoon Frank and Roman hit a pizza shop called May’s. When the hit was over, four people were executed. A cop was shot. A boy was dead. And when the sirens stopped wailing and the killers vanished into the heat, dozens of lives were shattered forever. Now it’s three years later, and Dimitri Karras, who lost a son, is starting to live again. But Dimitri’s old acquaintance, a P.I. named Nick Stefanos, has just unburied the past by discovering the killers’ identity. Suddenly the second act of a crime story is about to be told. Because the May’s pizza parlor killers are coming back into town: where they’ll be greeted with open arms, broken hearts, and at least one loaded gun.

Right as Rain

Derek Strange is an ex cop who’s making a good living with his own business, a detective agency called Strange Investigations. A new case hits him close to home: A police officer has been slain by another policeman in a confusing late night clash, and the dead officer’s mother asks Strange to help her make sense of his killing. That mother’s request sends Strange into the darkest chasms of the D.C. underworld, where police officers and criminals operate by their own secret laws, and where human life is sometimes of less consequence than cash, drugs, and other forms of currency. Strange is joined in his quest by Terry Quinn, the officer who was exonerated in the police inquiry into the shooting but who is still haunted by that terrifying night. Together Strange and Quinn confront the ravages of an unquenchable drug trade, the realities of race in the capital police force, and some of the most implacable, dead eyed killers ever to haunt the pages of a novel.

Hell to Pay

Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, the team of private investigators who made their stunning debut in Right As Rain, are hired to find a 14 year old white girl from the suburbs who’s run away from home and is now working as a prostitute. The two ex cops think they know D.C.’s dangers, but nothing in their experience has prepared them for Worldwide Wilson, the pimp whose territory they’re intruding upon. Combining inimitable neighborhood flavor, action scenes that rank among the best in fiction, and a clear eyed view of morality in a world with few rules, ‘Hell to Pay‘ is another Pelecanos masterpiece for his ever expanding audience to savor.

Soul Circus

A Washington, D.C., crime overlord is fighting for his life in court. Two younger dealers are fighting for his territory, prestige, and millions of dollars in future profits. It takes only one slip a kid going out of control with a rented pistol to push friction closer to wholesale slaughter.

In the midst of this extraordinary tension, private investigator Derek Strange has found a woman whose testimony could mean death or freedom for the crime lord. He wants her to talk but first he’ll have to find a way to keep her alive.

Step by step, Strange and his partner are drawn into the darkness, confronting gunrunners, drug dealers, and ordinary people caught up in the ruthless violence of the business. Soul Circus is a heart stopping thriller that could only have been written by George Pelecanos, the writer who ‘has gone from cult favorite to acknowledged master’ ‘Booklist’. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content George Pelecanos’s Washington, D.C., is a place rife with high living drug dealers, easily obtained guns, and a generation depleted by ignorance, excessive machismo, and misplaced trust in the equalizing power of violence. Yet PI Derek Strange ‘did love D.C.,’ as Pelecanos acknowledges in Soul Circus, his third novel after Right as Rain and Hell to Pay to feature this mid 50s black detective and his younger white partner, Terry Quinn. Strange’s optimism may be running at even higher gear than normal here, following his marriage to his longtime secretary, Janine Baker, and his determination to be a good stepfather to her son.

Picking up where Hell to Pay left off, we find Strange working in Soul Circus on behalf of Granville Oliver, a manipulative black mobster charged with murder and racketeering, who faces the death penalty. To help his client knock that sentence down to life imprisonment, Strange will have to find a nail salon worker named Devra Stokes, who used to be the girlfriend of Phillip Wood, a former associate of Oliver’s and now the prosecution’s chief witness against him. Stokes had sworn out an abuse complaint against Wood, and might testify that he was behind at least one of the killings Oliver is said to have planned. But, fearing for her own safety and that of her young son, she wants no part of Oliver’s defense. Meanwhile, Quinn against his better judgment helps a homely, unpredictable gangsta wannabe, Mario ‘Twigs’ Durham, locate his girlfriend, who supposedly went missing, but in fact skipped out with his drug stash. Even as the threads of this yarn come together amid a deadly gang conflict, Pelecanos stays focused on his characters not only his intriguingly troubled sleuths, but also a deftly nuanced cop turned gun dealer, Ulysses Foreman. Buttressed by Pelecanos’s street slangy prose, Soul Circus delivers an un blindered perspective on urban life and death that manages to be both frightening and hopeful. Not so unlike the city in which it’s set. J. Kingston Pierce

Hard Revolution

Hard Revolution is a rich, dramatic, totally engrossing story of two brothers one a rookie police officer, one a recently returned Vietnam veteran caught up in the chaos that engulfed D.C. in 1968, when riots followed the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Derek Strange is his family’s straight arrow, but his older brother Dennis has always had a harder time. Home from the war and in several varieties of trouble, Dennis is in danger of making one bad decision too many. While Derek tries to be there for Dennis, no amount of brotherly love can save Dennis from Alvin Jones, a local drug dealer who draws him into his web. An apocalyptic gun battle and an impossible decision collide in the electrifying climax of the most powerful book yet from George Pelecanos, a novelist who ‘writes with intelligence and complexity, as well as with a sober recognition of the evil at large in the world.’ Washington Post

What It Was

Washington, D.C., 1972. Derek Strange has left the police department and set up shop as a private investigator. His former partner, Frank ‘Hound Dog’ Vaughn, is still on the force. When a young woman comes to Strange asking for his help recovering a cheap ring she claims has sentimental value, the case leads him onto Vaughn’s turf, where a local drug addict’s been murdered, shot point blank in his apartment. Soon both men are on the trail of a ruthless killer: Red Fury, so called for his looks and the car his girlfriend drives, but a name that fits his personality all too well. Red Fury doesn’t have a retirement plan, as Vaughn points out he doesn’t care who he has to cross, or kill, to get what he wants. As the violence escalates and the stakes get higher, Strange and Vaughn know the only way to catch their man is to do it their own way. Rich with details of place and time the cars, the music, the clothes and fueled by non stop action, this is Pelecanos writing in the hard boiled noir style that won him his earliest fans and placed him firmly in the ranks of the top crime writers in America.

The Cut

Spero Lucas has a new line of work. Since he returned home after serving in Iraq, he has been doing special investigations for a defense attorney. He’s good at it, and he has carved out a niche: recovering stolen property, no questions asked. His cut is forty percent. A high profile crime boss who has heard of Lucas’s specialty hires him to find out who has been stealing from his operation. It’s the biggest job Lucas has ever been offered, and he quickly gets a sense of what’s going on. But before he can close in on what’s been taken, he tangles with a world of men whose amorality and violence leave him reeling. Is any cut worth your family, your lover, your life? Spero Lucas is George Pelecanos’s greatest creation, a young man making his place in the world one battle and one mission at a time. The first in a new series of thrillers featuring Spero Lucas, The Cut is the latest confirmation of why George Pelecanos is ‘perhaps America’s greatest living crime writer.’ Stephen King

Shoedog

From ‘the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world’ ‘Esquire’ comes this powerful early novel, now available in paperback for the first time the noirish story of how a Washington, D.C., liquor store heist shows a drifter named Constantine what it means to be a Shoedog. Martin’s Press.

Drama City

Lorenzo Brown just wants to stay straight. After eight years in prison on a drug charge, he’s come ‘uptown’ back to the Washington, DC neighborhood where he grew up, where his old cohorts still work their corners and their angles, trying to get ahead and stay alive. But Lorenzo’s had enough of the life: Now he has a job as a Humane Society officer, policing animal abusers and protecting the abused. In the dangerous streets he used to menace, Lorenzo plays a part in maintain ing order and it’s a role reversal some of his former friends don’t appreciate. Rachel Lopez, Lorenzo’s parole officer, tries to help him, even as she battles her own demons and excesses. Trying to stay one step ahead of her troubled past is a daily struggle. It looks like they both might make it, until a malevolent young killer, working for the powerful local drug boss, changes everything with one violent act. Now Lorenzo finds himself caught between the light and dark sides of the street, struggling to stay legit or throw everything away to exact revenge.

The Night Gardener

Also available as a Hachette Audio. 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. The murder unearths intense memories of a case Ramone worked as a patrol cop twenty years earlier, when he and his partner, Dan ‘Doc’ Holiday, assisted a legendary detective named T. C. Cook. The series of murders, all involving local teenage victims, was never solved. In the years since, Holiday has left the force under a cloud of morals charges, and now finds work as a bodyguard and driver. Cook has retired, but he has never stopped agonizing about the ‘Night Gardener’ killings. The new case draws the three men together on a grim mission to finish the work that has haunted them for years. All the love, regret, and anger that once burned between them comes rushing back, and old ghosts walk once more as the men try to lay to rest the monster who has stalked their dreams. Bigger and even more unstoppable than his previous thrillers, George Pelecanos achieves in The Night Gardener what his brilliant career has been building toward: a novel that is a perfect union of suspense, character, and unstoppable fate.

The Turnaround

On a hot summer afternoon in 1972, three teenagers drove into an unfamiliar neighborhood and six lives were altered forever. Thirty five years later, one survivor of that night reaches out to another, opening a door that could lead to salvation. But another survivor is now out of prison, looking for reparation in any form he can find it. The Turnaround takes us on a journey from the rock and soul streets of the ’70s to the changing neighborhoods of D.C. today, from the diners and auto garages of the city to the inside of Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, where wounded men and women have returned to the world in a time of war. It is a novel of fathers and sons, wives and husbands, loss, victory and violent redemption, another compelling, highly charged novel from George Pelecanos, ‘the best crime novelist in America.’ Oregonian George Pelecanos’ most recent novel, The Night Gardener, hit the New York Times Bestseller List and made more than 10 ‘Best Of 2006’ lists including Salon, Rocky Mountain News, Los Angeles Times, New York Sun, Washington Post Book World, Miami Herald, and Entertainment Weekly. TheLos Angeles Times nominated The Night Gardener for the 2006 Best Mystery/Thriller Book Award. 2008

The Way Home

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 new found stability with sudden treachery and violence. With his father and his most trusted friends, he takes one last chance to blast past the demons trying to pull him back. Like Richard Price or William Kennedy, Pelecanos pushes his characters to the extremes, their redemption that much sweeter because it is so hard fought. Pelecanos has long been celebrated for his unerring ability to portray the conflicts men feel as they search and struggle for power and love in a world that is often harsh and unforgiving but can ultimately be filled with beauty. 2009

D.C. Noir

Brand new stories by: George Pelecanos, James Grady, Kenji Jasper, Jim Beane, Jabari Asim, Ruben Castaneda, James Patton, Norman Kelley, Jennifer Howard, Richard Currey, Lester Irby, and others. 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, who*res, gangsters, and con men run rampant in zones of this city that most never hear about.

D.C. Noir 2

Classic reprints from: Edward P. Jones, George Pelecanos, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, James Grady, Julian Mayfield, Marita Golden, Elizabeth Hand, Julian Mazor, Ward Just, Jean Toomer, Roach Brown, Larry Neal, and others.

George Pelecanos is an independent film producer, the recipient of numerous international writing awards, a producer and an Emmy nominated writer of the HBO series The Wire, and the author of fifteen novels set in and around Washington, DC. He is the editor of the best selling first volume of D.C. Noir.

The Best American Mystery Stories 2008

A must read for anyone who cares about crime stories. BooklistThe award winning author and Emmy nominated television writer George Pelecanos serves as editor of the twelfth installment of this genre expanding anthology, featuring twenty of the past year’s most enthralling, suspenseful, and slyly illuminating mystery stories.A cut and dried case for a wily crime scene reconstructionist is turned on its head in Michael Connelly s Mulholland Dive. A terrible secret shared between two childhood friends resurfaces decades later as one of them lies on her deathbed in Alice Munro s masterful Child s Play. James Lee Burke tells the haunting tale of a Hurricane Katrina evacuee who unexpectedly finds comfort from an unimaginable loss in Mist. And in Holly Goddard Jones s Proof of God, a young man s car is repeatedly vandalized as proof that someone knows about the truths he d never willingly reveal. As Pelecanos notes in his introduction, the twenty original and unique voices in this collection pay homage to the genre s forebears by taking crime fiction into a thrilling new direction. But make no mistake, he says, we are all standing on the shoulders of writers who came before us and left an indelible mark on literature through craftsmanship, care, and the desire to leave something of worth behind.

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