Helpful Score: 2
Marcus & Dimitri make a fine pair of recurring characters for Pelecanos, along with several more. When I read this book, I kept thinking Pelecanos MUST have been a drug lord or a dealer or even homeless. It all seems perfectly real - gang executions, cocaine-fueled violence, stealing a sack of money - Pelecanos makes the action crackle and the dialogue is smooth and sometimes sassy.
Be sure to read King Suckerman before this one, and The Big Blowdown by Pelecanos is actually considered the first book in this four-book series. The Sweet Forever stands out as the best of the group.
Be sure to read King Suckerman before this one, and The Big Blowdown by Pelecanos is actually considered the first book in this four-book series. The Sweet Forever stands out as the best of the group.
The second Marcus & Dimitri book. A great read.
The second volume of the "DC Quartet", set in Washington DC in 1986, a city torn apart by the the cocaine trade. The only man prepared to do anything about it is Marcus Clay. But his wife has thrown him out and his best friend is hitting the recreational substances way too hard. Very entertaining.
A Pelecanos thriller, which uses a recurring cast of ordinary Washingtonians to chronicle the city's decline since WWII, brings us to 1986, when Vietnam vet Marcus Clay, founder of ("African American Owned and Operated") Real Right Records, and his employee and best friend, aging Greek-American cokehead Dmitri Karras, witness a grisly car accident outside Clay's newest record shop on the struggling U Street strip. A suburbanite, in town to score blow from Karras, steals $25,000 in drug money from the car and inadvertently starts a race between local hoods and dirty cops
