George P. Pelecanos Livres

Ça se passe un jour en mai. En 1972. Alex Pappas, 16 ans, décide de suivre ses acolytes pour une virée dans le quartier noir, histoire de semer un peu la pagaille. Forcément, l'affaire tourne mal. Trente-cinq ans plus tard, le souvenir de l'" incident " est toujours vivace. Certains cherchent à se racheter, d'autres veulent à nouveau en découdre. Tous ont encore la rage au ventre.

Four blistering novellas, drawn together by themes of strife, violence, and humanity, from esteemed crime fiction writer George Pelecanos

Washington DC, 1946. For two local young men, Pete Karras and Joey Recevo, the easiest way to find work after the war is by providing a little muscle for a local boss who runs a protection racket with the Mafia. The trouble with Pete Karras is that he is just too soft on his fellow immigrants, and the last thing the boss wants is for his mob to get soft. The boys have to teach Karras a painful lesson that he won't forget. Three years later Pete and Joey meet up once more and a final confrontation puts the meaning of friendship and honour to the ultimate test. "The Big Blowdown" is the first novel in Pelecanos' acclaimed "Washington Quartet".

A classic collection from the hottest talent in US crime writing

A young woman is brutally murdered and PIs Strange and Quinn are forced to confront their own part in the crime . . .

Washington, D.C., 1972. Derek Strange has left the police department and set up shop as a private investigator. His former partner, Frank 'Hound Dog' Vaughn, is still on the force. When a young woman comes to Strange asking for his help recovering a cheap ring she claims has sentimental value, the case leads him onto Vaughn's turf, where a local drug addict's been murdered, shot point-blank in his apartment. Soon both men are on the trail of a ruthless killer: Red Fury, so called for his looks and the car his girlfriend drives, but a name that fits his personality all too well. Red Fury doesn't have a retirement plan, as Vaughn points out - he doesn't care who he has to cross, or kill, to get what he wants. As the violence escalates and the stakes get higher, Strange and Vaughn know the only way to catch their man is to do it their own way. Rich with details of place and time - the cars, the music, the clothes - and fuelled by non-stop action, this is Pelecanos writing in the hard-boiled noir style that won him his earliest fans and placed him firmly in the ranks of the top crime writers in America.

A rookie policeman in Washington, D.C. is surrounded by crimes that will make him the man he is eventually going to be.

A gritty urban crime thriller from one of the award-winning writers of THE WIRE.

Marcus Clay's record store is at the epicenter of the drug trade in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1980s. Dimitri Karras, his best friend and store manager, is rapidly developing a nasty drug habit. But things get worse when the two men witness the theft of the bag of a local drug lord who is willing to destroy the entire neighborhood to get it back. "A detailed and emotionally powerful crime novel."--"Chicago Tribune."

Hired to find a fourteen-year-old girl who has run away from home and started working as a prostitute, Derek Strange and Terry Quinn are forced to confront a dangerous adversary in pimp Worldwide Wilson.

Wilton Cooper is at a drive-in movie when he notices the ugly white boy walk into the projection booth. Seconds later a gun goes off, perfectly timed to coincide with the movie?s noisy climax. When the boy struts coolly out, blood sprayed on the front of his cheap print shirt, Cooper knows he?s found his partner. King Suckerman weaves the blaxploitation films, the drug deals, the soul music and the racial tensions that defined the ?70?s into a story of natural-born killers and two men who risk everything to bring them down. This is the second novel in the DC Quartet, the most explosive contribution to crime fiction since Ellroy?s LA Quartet.

The first in the excellent Strange and Quinn series from 'The coolest writer in America' GQ. Derek Strange and Terry Quinn are ex-cops turned private detectives in Washington, DC. Hired to investigate the death of an off-duty black police officer at the hands of a white policeman, Strange and Quinn are faced with the institutionalised racism of the nation's most poorly trained and dangerous police force. As the two private detectives confront the degradation of the city's flourishing drug trade, they find themselves up against some of the most implacable, dead-eyed killers ever to grace the pages of a novel. In RIGHT AS RAIN George Pelecanos introduces a memorable pair of characters into the grittily real Washington DC landscape which has led to him being acclaimed as 'a great writer' THE TIMES

'Perhaps the greatest living American crime writer' STEPHEN KING Washington, D.C., 1995. What should have been a straightforward restaurant robbery goes horribly wrong. Several workers are shot in cold blood; the gunman's brother is killed by the police; a young boy is run over by a careering getaway car. Three years pass. Victims and their relatives gather in the aftermath, still trying to come to terms with their grief. But gunman Frank Farrow has other ideas. Now the heat has died down, he is on his way back to Washington, determined to avenge his lost brother - by killing everyone involved in his death.

On a hot summer afternoon in 1972, three teenagers drove into an unfamiliar neighborhood and six lives were altered forever. Thirty five years later, one survivor of that day reaches out to another, opening a door that could lead to salvation. But another survivor is now out of prison, looking for reparation in any form he can find it. The Turnaround takes us on a journey from the rock-and-soul streets of the '70s to the changing neighborhoods of D.C. today, from the diners and auto garages of the city to the inside of Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, where wounded men and women have returned to the world in a time of war. A novel of fathers and sons, wives and husbands, loss, victory and violent redemption, The Turnaround is another compelling, highly charged novel from George Pelecanos, "the best crime novelist in America."

The first in a stunning action-packed series from one of the writers of THE WIRE.

Constantine is a drifter with a lot of miles behind him, a lot more ahead and plenty of jobs in between that never showed up on anyone's books. Back in his home town, he hitches a ride on a bright spring morning with a little man named Polk. There's one stop Polk needs to make, and it changes Constantine's life forever. Like the kind of cars they don't make anymore and the kind of songs they don't sing, Shoedog has the style, rhythm and muscle of a classic.

Lorenzo Brown, a street investigator for the Humane Society, has recently completed an eight-year stretch in prison for narcotics and is determined to stay clean and free. Rachel Lopez, Lorenzo's parole officer, spends her days chasing down clients and her nights getting drunk in bars and having rough sex with strangers. The ignition point for the violence that eventually engulfs these two fully realized, attractive characters.

The second novel featuring Spero Lucas, a young Iraq vet working as a PI in Washington DC but with a sideline in finding lost items - the kind of items the owners can't go to the police about. This time Spero is trying to find a painting belonging to a sexy young woman who was scammed out of it by a super-smooth con artist, part of a team of ruthless thugs. Spero tracks the painting down but the woman is brutally attacked to warn him off. Spero goes on the attack and takes the gang out one by one in their isolated house in the woods - prompting the question: have his experiences in Iraq turned him into an amoral killer no better than the crooks he's up against? It's this question that gives the book its dark edge, and moral ambiguity, with a hero we're not quite sure we should like.

Pelecanos breaks new literary ground with the story of a dog's life--from the dog's perspective--on the mean streets of Washington, DC

Nick, having earned his PI license, quickly finds that snapping unfaithful husbands doesn't make a fulfilling job. So when Billy, an old school friend, asks Nick to find his wife, Nick jumps at the job.

As advertising director of Nutty Nathan's, Nick Stefanos knows all the tricks of the electronics business. Blow-out sales and shady deals are his life. When a stockroom boy hooked on speed metal and the fast life disappears, Nick has to help find him.

A great novel from one of America's finest literary crime writers... They never found the killer. All they knew, back in the winter of 1985, was that someone was taking teenagers, killing them and leaving their abused bodies in public parks. Three victims in all, with no link between them except a oddity of their names. They read the same back-to-front - Otto, Ava and lastly Eve. A lot has happened in the twenty years since. Detectives Gus Ramone and Dan Holiday - two of the leads on the case - have pursued very different paths. Gus has climbed to the heights of Detective Sergeant and built himself a reputation as a very good cop, whilst Dan has been drummed out of the force - his sleaze finally getting too much for his superiors. However, their paths are about to cross again. A boy named Asa - a close friend of Gus's teenage son - has been found in the public park, his skull shattered by gunfire. Now it seems that both men are once again in the path of this disturbed serial killer. THE NIGHT GARDENER is George Pelecanos's stunning crime thriller - the story of two very different men united by the maliciousness of a deadly attacker.

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.

Charlie Unger's dead, been lying in his flat for a week. Charlie was old Cardiff through and through. Like Dame Shirley, he was a black kid from Tiger Bay. He found fame and fortune in the fifties as a boxer, lightweight champion of the world. Charlie's funeral brought the Wurriyas back together again.

Die „Washington-Trilogie", mit der George P. Pelecanos den historischen Noir-Roman erfand, zeigt die amerikanische Hauptstadt von ihrer dunkelsten Seite – aus Sicht der Einwanderer. Sie müssen abseits der Boulevards ihren Weg finden, um an ein Stück vom trockenen Kuchen des amerikanischen Traums zu kommen. In genau recherchierten Zeitbildern, mit fesselnder Atmosphäre und meisterhaft gesetzten Dialogen zeichnen die drei Romane ein düsteres Bild vom zwanzigsten Jahrhundert in Amerika. Die „Washington-Trilogie" setzt ein in den 40er und 50er Jahren, als in den Gangs der griechischen Einwanderer das organisierte Verbrechen entsteht. Sie erzählt aus den 70ern mit ihren Black Movies, Haschisch, Soul Music und der Aufbruchsstimmung der Schwarzen. Sie endet in den süßen 80er Jahren, zwischen Kokain und Bandenkriegen: Grausamkeit ist das einzige, auf das man sich verlassen kann. George P. Pelecanos, „the coolest writer in America" (GQ), ist auch in Deutschland zur großen Entdeckung der amerikanischen Kriminalliteratur geworden.

Il giallo è una vera e propria sfumatura dell'animo umano, un imprevisto dietro l'angolo che in un istante ci catapulta in una dimensione inattesa. E in questa raccolta, a indagare sulle ombre della realtà quotidiana sono le migliori firme della letteratura americana contemporanea: da Michael Connelly, che ci racconta cosa si nasconde dietro l'ennesimo incidente successo nel buio di Mulholland Drive, a Alice Munro, che disvela l'indicibile e crudele segreto risalente all'infanzia di due donne ormai adulte; da James Lee Burke, che ci proietta nei bassifondi della provincia intorno a una New Orleans distrutta dall'uragano Katrina, a Joyce Carol Oates, che illumina la tensione che cova in una casa in una piccola cittadina dello Stato di New York tra un padre cieco e due figlie separate dagli eventi della vita, fino poi a Elizabeth Strout, Holly Goddard Jones e molti altri. Venti storie diverse unite da una grande scrittura e da una capacità magnetica di sorprendere il lettore.

Washington, D. C.: Bartender und Gelegenheitsdetektiv Nick Stefanos ist ziemlich am Ende und lebt eigentlich nur noch für den nächsten Drink. Als er eines Abends auf einer Parkbank am Anacostia River heillos betrunken Ohrenzeuge des Mordes an dem Teenager Calvin Jeter wird, reißt er sich zusammen, denn die Metropolitan Police scheint der Fall nicht besonders zu interessieren, sie hält den Toten doch für ein typisches Opfer der Washingtoner Gang-Kriminalität. Aber Nick weiß, dass Gangs keine Schalldämpfer benutzen – gemeinsam mit Privatdetektiv Jack LaDuke versucht er die Killer zu fassen und findet sich bald in einem Sumpf aus Drogen und sexueller Ausbeutung wieder: Eine Reise in die Dunkelheit der menschlichen Seele und durch die schwärzesten Schatten der amerikanischen Hauptstadt beginnt ...

Deutscher Krimipreisträger 2004§§Das Ermittlerduo Derek Strange und Terry Quinn soll eine 14jährige suchen, die von zu Hause ausgerissen ist. Herauszufinden, daß sie als Prostituierte im brutalsten Viertel Washingtons arbeitet, ist leicht - sie dort herauszuholen wesentlich schwieriger. Ein spannender, atemberaubend schneller Thriller und ein hartes, realistisches Gesellschaftsbild des heutigen Amerika.

Ad Anacostia, il quartiere più malfamato di Washington D.C., Derek Strange e la sua agenzia investigativa sono l'unica risorsa per chi si sforza di credere ancora nel valore della verità. Quando un noto spacciatore della zona, Granville Oliver, viene incarcerato con l'accusa di omicidio e rischia di finire sulla sedia elettrica, Strange accetta di scandagliare la rete intricata di ricatti e omertà che sta dietro al delitto. Ma nessuno sembra disposto a collaborare con lui e con il suo partner Terry Quinn, tranne una giovane donna, ex fidanzata del vice di Oliver, l'unica che accetta di parlare a rischio della vita.

Il corpo di Asa Johnson è nascosto tra i cespugli di un giardino pubblico. Già a un primo sguardo la causa della morte risulta essere un unico colpo di pistola alla testa, per il resto il suo corpo sembra non aver subito violenza. Questo è il macabro spettacolo che Dan Holiday, ex agente della polizia di Washington, si trova di fronte durante una passeggiata nel cuore della notte, fatta solo per schiarirsi le idee. Non può che essere una nuova vittima dell'assassino che vent'anni prima chiamavano "il giardiniere notturno". Il suo modo di procedere era lo stesso: vittima minorenne, di colore, che veniva sodomizzata, freddata con un colpo di pistola e poi completamente ripulita, come per purificarla dalla violenza subita. C'era anche quel particolare inconfondibile: i ragazzi avevano tutti nomi palindromi. Holiday aveva lavorato al caso con T.C. Cook, la leggenda del dipartimento. Ora le loro vite sono completamente diverse. Dan ha lasciato la polizia e fa l'autista per ricchi uomini d'affari. Cook è in pensione da qualche anno, ma il fatto di non essere riuscito a mettere le mani su quello spietato serial killer ancora lo tortura. Dopo il ritrovamento del ragazzo i due si rimettono in contatto con Gus Ramone, il terzo uomo che si era occupato dell'indagine, che è ancora in polizia, e ricominciano da dove avevano lasciato. La loro è una corsa contro il tempo.