Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | MYSTERY PEL | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
'You 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.
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 (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Welcome to the unlit bleakness of grunge crime fiction. Nick Stefanos (Nick's Trip) inhabits D.C.'s most squalid streets, tending bar, boozing for free, wasting his 30s and dating a girl with a taste for the sauce to rival his. One night, out on a bender and nearly passed out, he hears a murder being committed and decides to find the killers (how a guy this hammered can later remember so much is cheerfully glossed over). Nick gets himself an alarmingly straight-arrow partner and dives headlong into the underbelly of the porn trade. Two young black men have been dealing drugs and selling their bodies; one is dead, and the other is missing. Stefanos only pauses to drink, listen to music by bands with whom only the hippest readers will be familiar and have a few bouts of desperate sex. Although his innumerable descriptions of bars and boozing might leave some bored (or queasy), Pelecanos joins company with James Ellroy, Andrew Vachss and Jack O' Connell in extending the noirest tones of crime fiction. Here, he unleashes a lacerating view of urban angst and degradation. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Pelecanos returns from the striking Shoedog (1994) to the saga of D.C. barman and sometime shamus Nick Stefanos. This time, Nick wakes up from an overnight drunk to find that he's sharing riverbank space with late teen Calvin Jeter, and decides that he just can't leave the case to the uninterested Metropolitan Police. Passing himself off as ``assisting'' the cops, Nick questions Calvin's family and friends, ties him and his missing pal, Roland Lewis, in to drugs and man-boy porn, then joins Jack LaDuke, a p.i. who's new to the cityand, evidently, to eating with knives and forksto run down the responsible parties. Nick and his incomparably seamy milieu, in their third outing (Nick's Trip, 1993, etc.), get an A, though the case is the sort of five-finger exercise usually associated with tired old pros resting up between their big events.
Booklist Review
Give bartender Nick Stefanos a bottle of booze, a pack of smokes, and some good lovin', and he's a happy man. Nick lives for the first and last drinks of the day and all the drinks between, but once in a while, he comes out of his alcoholic fog and does some detecting work. After a stupor-inducing night with a bottle of Jack Daniels, Stefanos comes to on the bank of the Anacostia River and hears a murder being committed just yards away. The experience shakes him out of his funk and draws him into a mysterious case with roots deep in the D.C. ghetto. Stefanos teams up with one Jack LaDuke to find the murderers, but even with a partner, he's got more than he can handle. Pelecanos writes the ultimate in hard-boiled, hardcore fiction, with evil characters, graphic violence, and rough language. This is a powerful, shocking foray into an uncompromising, bleak world of depravity and decadence, a book that will stick with the reader long after the awful conclusion. --Emily Melton
