*Starred Review* Pelecanos has been justly celebrated for his noir sensibility and his gritty portraits of the streets of Washington, D.C., but he hasn't been recognized for what may be his greatest achievement: redefining the art of writing serial fiction. Crime fiction series often grow stale as authors are forced to repeat themselves ad infinitum. Pelecanos has avoided that trap by creating an ensemble of characters, all of whom live in Washington, and jumping between them from novel to novel. Even better, he goes back and forth in time, not with plot-driven prequels but in a way that builds context both in terms of character development and sense of place. Just as The Big Blowdown (1996) gave that kind of depth and context to the earlier Nick Stefanos novels, so Pelecanos' latest looks back at the early life of Derek Strange, hero of four previous books, including Soul Circus (2002). The action, which takes place in the weeks previous to and the days immediately after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., centers on two groups of petty criminals and their ill-formed plans to hold up a convenience store and a bank. As in earlier books, Pelecanos devotes the foreground to these train wrecks waiting to happen, while focusing our attention on the people destined to cross the railroad tracks at the wrong time: doomed criminals, equally doomed cops, soul-suffering mothers and fathers. And this time there is the finale, an even larger train wreck, the riots in Washington's inner city following the King assassination. As Strange, a proud black man and a good cop, is forced to work riot control in his own neighborhood, all of the unresolvable conflicts--personal, racial, historical, political--that have roiled in the background of this novel are ignited in front of our eyes. Like Nathanael West describing the burning of Hollywood in The Day of the Locust, Pelecanos stage manages the conflagration perfectly, capturing the personal tragedy and the metaphorical significance vividly and directly. All of Pelecanos' books, whether set before or after King's death, somehow have been pointing to this moment, and he makes the most of it. Bill Ott
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George P. Pelecanos is a screenwriter, independent film producer, award-winning journalist, and the author of the bestselling series of novels set in and around Washington, D.C., where he lives with his wife and children. Pelecanos is also at work as a producer on the HBO hit series The Wire.