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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
George P. Pelecanos was born in Washington, D.C. on February 18, 1957. Before becoming an author, he worked as a line cook, dishwasher, bartender, and woman's shoe salesman. His first novel, A Firing Offense, was published in 1992. His other books include Nick's Trip, Shoedog, King Suckerman, Right as Rain, Hard Revolution, Drama City, The Night Gardener, and What It Was. He has received numerous awards including the Raymond Chandler award in Italy, the Falcon award in Japan, and the Grand Prix Du Roman Noir in France. Hell to Pay and Soul Circus were awarded the 2003 and 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.
He has served as producer on the feature films Caught (1996), Whatever (1998) and BlackMale (1999). He was a producer, writer, and story editor for the HBO series, The Wire, which won the Peabody Award and the AFI Award. He was also a writer and co-producer on the HBO World War II miniseries The Pacific and an executive producer and writer on the HBO series Treme.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Pelecanos (The Turnaround) probes the volatile and fragile relationship between a father, Thomas Flynn, and his son, Chris, in this less than satisfying effort. As a rebellious teen into drugs, Chris had minor brushes with the law and did a stint in juvenile prison. Now 26, he's working for his father's D.C.-area carpet installation business and staying clean. Still, Thomas remains disappointed in his son's lack of achievement or ambition, and Chris remains resentful that he's not accepted for who he is. A rather tired device, a bag of stolen money found by Chris and a friend and fellow former inmate, serves to set in motion a chain of actions that will lead to critical decisions for both Flynns. Pelecanos adroitly sketches the obstacles and temptations that face juvenile offenders in and after prison, but this novel, with its dispassionate style, never manages to generate high suspense or evoke much sympathy for its characters. Author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Pelecanos' last novel, The Turnaround (2008), reflected a sea change for the celebrated author, one that has been gathering strength over the last few years. Rather than following the downward track of characters trapped in the inner-city quicksand of poverty, ignorance, and prejudice, he would tell stories about individuals who, through a combination of luck, circumstance, and determination, were able to chart new courses for themselves. This time it's Chris Flynn, a bad kid from a good family in Washington, D.C., who endures the soul-deadening experience of juvenile prison but, with the help of caring parents, emerges with a chance at a life outside the cycle of violence into which he fell as a teenager. Then, on a carpet-laying job, he and a coworker, a friend from juvie also committed to the straight life, find a satchel of money; they return the loot to its hidey-hole, but like an evil magnet, it draws them back into the world they thought they'd escaped. Pelecanos has always been a master at building tension through a sense of inevitability, showing his readers the collision course down which his characters careen while at the same time making us feel their powerlessness to jerk the wheel. Now, as in The Turnaround, Pelecanos charts two parallel courses: the collision to come and a possible way home. If the narrative arc of this novel is a little too similar to its predecessor to be completely satisfying, it still packs a strong emotional wallop while reminding us that it's possible to tell stories of tentative hope with the same unflinching honesty as those of utter hopelessness.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Love her or loathe her, Libby Day won't be forgotten without a fight. The embittered antiheroine of Gillian Flynn's nerve-fraying thriller, DARK PLACES (Shaye Areheart, $24), Libby comes by her cynicism fair and square. When she was 7, her 15-year-old brother, Ben, took an ax to her mother and two older sisters, and, 24 years later, the girl the tabloids called "the Lone Survivor of the Prairie Massacre" is still seething with anger over everything she lost. Not that family life was all that nurturing in the impoverished Day household, what with a deadbeat dad running the farm into the ground before taking off and a mother so overwhelmed she just gave up. "I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ," Libby confesses. An admitted liar and thief, she's a champion slacker who takes pride in the antisocial behavior that has become her default defense posture: "I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way." Fueling Libby's resentment, the "Baby Day" trust fund that has kept her in cigarettes and out of the work force is about to-dry up. Not knowing what she's letting herself in for, she accepts an invitation to appear at the Kill Club, an underground organization for enthusiasts of infamous criminal cases - only to discover that these ghoulish fans, who believe Ben to be innocent, expect her to help them prove it. Cash in hand, Libby grits her teeth and reopens communication with everyone who figured in the case, including her imprisoned brother and their worthless father. Once she starts examining the massacre from an adult perspective, Libby finds that the profit motive is less of an incentive than her desire to know the truth, which Flynn shrewdly doles out in vivid flashbacks that lead up to the killings. If there's a conscious theme here, it has to do with children who cause "something to happen, something that got bigger than they were" and the chaos that follows when no responsible adults are around. But the term "prairie massacre" might also apply to the destruction of the rural Midwest, captured by the strip clubs, bankrupt malls, abandoned homesteads and other scenes of surpassing ugliness that assault Libby's eyes as she travels the Interstate to her brother's prison, now the major industry in a depressed farm town that once called itself the "Heart of America." Spotting a spiffy new sign with the same old slogan, Libby wryly notes that the locals are still "sticking with the lie." Nobody can teach George Pelecanos anything he doesn't already know about the inherent drama in the father-son dynamic - except, perhaps, a dramatist like Arthur Miller or August Wilson. That thought comes from reading THE WAY HOME (Little, Brown, $24.99), which feels like a crime novel that wants to be something else - a play, if not a movie. There's more character work than action in this sweetly sad narrative about a decent man, Thomas Flynn, who can't figure out how to deal with his teenage son, Chris, when the boy dumps sports and schoolwork to take up marijuana and mischief, becoming so destructive that he pulls a stretch in a juvenile correction facility. After taking his sympathetic portrayal of the father-son standoff as far as it can go, Pelecanos remembers that he needs to work some serious crime into the story. Dutifully, he cooks up a moral challenge for the adult Chris, now so fully reformed that he's laying carpet for his father's company and dating a girl his family actually likes. But the device Pelecanos engineers - the discovery of a gym bag with nearly $50,000 in cash - is too tame to support the violence that follows. In the end, we'd rather be back at the beginning, when father and son were at each other's throats. In the rural North Carolina town where John Hart sets THE LAST CHILD (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), a fatherless boy is a pitiful sight. Everyone feels awful about 13-year-old Johnny Merrimon, whose father fled in despair only two weeks after Johnny's twin sister was kidnapped. The detective on the case feels worse about Johnny's fragile mother, who seems to welcome the abuse of the vile rich man who now supports her. In the absence of any tangible police investigation (Hart is cavalier about forensic procedures), Johnny takes it on himself to canvass the entire county on his bike, conscientiously noting potential pedophiles on tax maps. The story is a good one, and Johnny stands out from the clichéd characters around him. But borrowing from "Huck Finn" doesn't turn Hart into Mark Twain, and his methodical writing style plods along these Southern roads without kicking up anything but dust. Somebody's got to defend all those grown-ups who were once naughty boys and girls, and Maggie Estep and Seth Harwood are perfect for the job. Estep champions outlaws and outcasts like the title character of ALICE FANTASTIC (Akashic, paper, $15.95), a race-track handicapper who lives in Queens with a "trailer trash dog" named Candy and a criminally clumsy boyfriend named Clayton. Harwood has a soft spot for losers like Jack Palms, a one-hit movie star who grabs his chance to get back in the game in JACK WAKES UP (Three Rivers, paper, $13.95) when a San Francisco hustler asks him to play the role of a man-about-town for some visiting gangsters on a drug buy. Neither author seems to give a hoot about plot logistics, and both Alice and Jack allow themselves to be swept up by events. But in these two books, the storytelling has vitality and a spirit of rebellion, giving us hope for the future of all those bad girls with dirty faces and bad boys on bikes. 'I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ,' the embittered narrator of Gillian Flynn's novel confesses.
Guardian Review
The latest novel from highly acclaimed American author Pelecanos has the neat feeling, and framework, of a fable. Even the title has an echo of The Wizard of Oz ; but we're in Washington DC, not Kansas, with young men who are caught up in the destructive hurricane of low self-esteem, disaffection and petty crime. Written in a dense, factual style, it's the story of white, middle-class Chris Flynn, who ends up in a juvenile prison, breaking the hearts of his parents. On release, he teams up with another ex-detainee to work in his father's carpet-laying business, and things go well until they discover $50,000 hidden under some floorboards . . . Pelecanos clearly feels strongly about his subject-matter, which leads to occasional lapses into polemic, but his pitiless concentration on how minor decisions end up making huge differences, and how two generations of a family try, and fail, to understand each other, makes this a riveting read. Caption: article-junecrime.3 The latest novel from highly acclaimed American author Pelecanos has the neat feeling, and framework, of a fable. Even the title has an echo of The Wizard of Oz ; but we're in Washington DC, not Kansas, with young men who are caught up in the destructive hurricane of low self-esteem, disaffection and petty crime. - Laura Wilson.
Kirkus Review
A crime novel, yes, but the talented Pelecanos (The Turnaround, 2008, etc.) shoves it out of its comfort zone. He needn't worry, 17 year old Chris Flynn brashly assures his father as the door of Pine Ridge Reformatory is about to shut behind him: "I know how to jail." How did Chris get there, decently brought up kid that he isloving parents, solid middle-class home? He has no idea. Oh, he can talk about "Good Chris, Bad Chris," but that riff no longer satisfies the way it once did. All he knows for sure is that Bad Chris brought him within an inch of killing someone during a wild, drug-filled night that ended with a string of exasperated D.C. cops running him down. Thus his sentence to Pine Ridge, leaving a frustrated father and a heartbroken mother wondering where they went wrong. Unexpectedly, however, Pine Ridge proves to be a way of starting over. Bleak and dehumanizing though it is, Chris grows up there, copes with adversity, makes better friends, keeps Bad Chris caged. Ten years later, he's put a life together. He has a worthwhile girlfriend. His always thorny relationship with his father is at least manageable. Lulled, he thinks the past is safely buried. But when a pair of killers show up claiming he has something that belongs to them, Chris learns how inexorably the past is prologue. Redemption the hard way, well-crafted and deeply felt. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Pelecanos mines familiar territory in his new novel about the strained relationship between a father and son in Washington, DC. Chris Flynn disappointed his father terribly when, after a string of juvenile crimes, he finally committed one serious enough to land himself in Pine Ridge, a facility for juvenile offenders. Now an adult, Chris is working for his father's carpet installation company, leading a clean life and hoping to earn his father's respect. Trouble comes in the form of $50,000 found at a job site and someone from Chris's Pine Ridge past. While Pelecanos has a knack for strong characterization and a clear sense of place, the similarities to his work on HBO's The Wire and his recent The Turnaround make this novel somewhat of a disappointment to regular fans.-Julie Elliott, Indiana Univ. Lib., South Bend (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.