Customer Reviews

Nick's Trip (Old Edition) (Mask Noir Title)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The three Nick Stefanos mysteries (of which this is the second) follow the linear descent of their hero from rebellious career stiff to hard drinking private eye to hopeless alcoholic. Along the way, Nick bares his soul more completely than do most first person narrative P.I.'s. His stories are also among the most darkly violent and gritty that I've come across in the genre. "Nick's Trip" is better than "A Firing Offense," the first Stefanos book, if only because it is more plausible and more focussed. Along the way, Nick reunites with an old friend who has become an obnoxious yuppie and whose wife has disappered. He also manages to lose his girlfriend and become a surrogate father. The whole book has an overwhelming feeling of lonliness to it, like a late night country song. It is definately NOT for readers of light mainstream fiction.

Overall, a must read for fans of authors such as James Crumley and Andrew Vachss and anyone else who likes their P.I. fiction truly hard boiled.

I am a fan of Pelecanos' novels. He is one of the best mystery writers around. His stories are character driven, well written, and full of atmosphere. So what's wrong with Nick's Trip? There's too much trip. We spend too much time driving around and drinking and slumming in sleazy bars. Now in real life that's fun, but in the novel it eventually gets boring. One scene reminds us of another, one bar smells like another, one morning-after feels like another, and eventually we beg Pelecanos to stop the car and let us out. Nick's Trip is a good novel, better than a lot of other mystery novels out there, but it's not Pelecanos' best.

Nick Stefanos is a private eye who helps make ends meet by working behind the bar at a place called the Spot. An old buddy from school tracks him down and asks him to find his wife. While working the case we are continually taken back to Nick's youth as he remembers old friends and family. The storyline lurches from chapter to chapter. One minute he's working on the case in search of a missing woman, the next he's running down leads about a murdered friend leaving us to make the necessary mental adjustments.

Nick's a hard-drinking, hard-smoking bloke who's marching to the beat of his own drummer. This is not a light hearted romp, rather, we trudge through the seedier parts of town with a character who tends to fit right in. The method of chasing up leads seems to be an endless series of visits to bars throughout the D.C. area with a necessary shot and a beer at each. You've got to be prepared to accept that Nick Stefanos has many faults and weaknesses and is not your average private investigator. Oh, by the way, even with all his faults, I still found the story quite enjoyable.

This was the first Pelecanos book I ever read, and it had me snared from the very beginning. This guy is so talented, so funny, and so adept at capturing the raw feel of average daily life for a simple bartender who occasionally plays private detective. I found myself in awe of the writing in this book; so original, so humorous...with characters so real that you can't help rooting for them. Pelecanos has now gone on to write books which are far more serious and not nearly as good, in my opinion. His first three books, featuring PI Nick Stefanos, are really fantastic and to me, this is the best of the three. A far cry from the usual tale of the down-and-out PI who drinks too much and cries in his beer all day. This book is truly original, a real gem, and fans of PI fiction (and blue-collar literature) will love it.

Pelecanos's pace, plotting, and ear for street talk are light years beyond most mystery fare with plodding dialog and flat characters. Like him or not, and like a lot of alkies, there's something about him ya gotta love, Nick's trip is one you want to tbe on. The DC locales are depicted with a neat folding in of history and the contemporary scene. The locales hum with etched characters and sharp dialog. The writing has restraint, dark humor, and a relentless complex and ultimately satisfying plot. The lesbian sex scene is a classic, anti-erotic but pinging on male and female sexuality and aspects of relationship that invoke something deeper. Everyman whose been with a woman whose interest was somewhere else can take something from it. Did I say it was funny as hell?

Nick's trip is a well written but structurally flawed piece of work. Mr. Pelecanos has a real gift for creating characters and displays it well here. My only gripe is that he fails in trying to keep 3 story lines going simultaneously. Instead of each story successfully reflecting and adding to the others to build a stronger whole, the book winds up feeling slightly disjointed and episodic. Despite this caveat it is definitely worth reading.

Another fine effort by Pelecanos. I had run across Nick in some of the author's other work, but I didn't really appreciate him until I read Nick's Trip. Nick Stefanos is a strong character in his own right - witty, versatile and resourceful. He handles a pretty tough situation in this well crafted story.

Better than any other crime mystery writer I'm familiar with, Pelecanos knows how to develop characters, paint interesting word pictures of what's going on and produce a fine story. If he writes it, I'm reading it and I'd recommend you check him out. This book is as good a place as any to start.

I'm just getting into Pelicanos and generally like his writing. I found this early novel to be a bit too dreary and pessimistic to be completely enjoyable. The protagonist, Nick Stefanos, is a 30-something guy on a long downward spiral of dead end jobs, booze and drugs. He hasn't given up altogether though and his new venture as a private eye leads him into a hunt for an old friend's wife who has bolted from home and hearth with $200,000 taken from her husband's business associate. There's much more to the story as Stefanos finds out as he pursues the woman. A parallel investigation into the murder of a journalist friend puts Stefanos at further risk.

Much of "Nick's Trip"--and other Pelicanos' books--include numerous and minutely detailed descriptions of Washington DC neighborhoods, streets, places, etc. that ought to please any denizen of the city (like me). But, in fact, the laundry list of locations doesn't really evoke much of a feeling for the city. Of course, the place has changed a lot since this novel came out in 1993--something a resident of the city is more aware of than most readers of the book.

This was an okay and easy read and has been very well described by earlier reviewers, so I'll just leave it at that.

I quite liked A FIRING OFFENSE, the first Nick Stefanos novel, but this one goes a step further and gives us a better glimpse of the author as well as of his early main character.Again, there's lots of drinking, some drugs, and a lot of mucical references, all combining to set the pace. As in the first book, the deveopment is slow, but steady and enough to keep our attention until we get deeper into the story. By all means, if you like Pellecanos' later books, you'll quite enjoy this earlier one.

A grungy novel that initially trips through an alcoholic and smokey fug. Nick is a footloose guy with multiples of everything: jobs, trips, beers & whiskey, girls, old friends, drugs, trips, old stories, radios, corpses, and cases. Eventually two plot lines rise up and disentangle themselves, although still requiring lots of car travel and bar hopping. The endless radio music "soundtrack" that is a unique feature of this sordid story is more meaningful to the iPod generation if you know the oldie songs. This is a low-life suspense story, neither a thriller nor a mystery with solvable clues. Pelecano shows he is a good, if filthy and graphic, writer. His prose has a good, colloquial flow to it, without the awkward disjunctions of, say, a Jeffery Deaver. Safe slumming, but "no redeeming social value."