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

Like most of the trouble in Nick Stefanos' life, it started with a drink.

Lying in the darkness, drunk and immobile, Nick hears two men murder a terrified teenager. When he wakes in the morning, his memory is blurred. But the dead boy is still there, submerged in the river.

The police presume it's a gang-killing - no shortage of them in DC. But Nick isn't sure; gangs don't use silencers. Hit men do. Despite not having worked a PI case for a year and a half, Nick starts investigating, driven by an obsessive need for the truth. And with each clue he unearths, he's driven further into the darkest corners of the human soul.

The third novel in the Nick Stefanos series.

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

About the Author
George Pelecanos was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957. He worked as a line cook, dishwasher, bartender, and woman's shoe salesman before publishing his first novel in 1992. Pelecanos is the author of twenty books set in and around Washington, D.C.: A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, Shoedog, Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go, The Big Blowdown, King Suckerman, The Sweet Forever, Shame the Devil, Right as Rain, Hell to Pay, Soul Circus, Hard Revolution, Drama City, The Night Gardener, The Turnaround, The Way Home, The Cut, What It Was, The Double, and The Martini Shot. He has been the recipient of 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. The Turnaround won the Hammett Prize for literary excellence in the field of crime writing. His fiction has appeared in Playboy, Esquire, and the collections Unusual Suspects, Best American Mystery Stories of 1997, Measures of Poison, Best American Mystery Stories of 2002, Men From Boys, and Murder at the Foul Line. He served as editor on the collections D.C. Noir and D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, as well as The Best Mystery Stories of 2008. He is an award-winning essayist who has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, GQ, Sight and Sound, Uncut, Mojo, and numerous other publications. Esquire magazine called him "the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world." In Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King wrote that Pelecanos is "perhaps the greatest living American crime writer." Pelecanos would like to point out that Mr. King used the word "perhaps." Pelecanos was a producer, writer, and story editor for the acclaimed HBO dramatic series, The Wire, winner of the Peabody Award, the AFI Award, and the Edgar. He was nominated for an Emmy for his writing on that show. He was a writer and co-producer on the World War II miniseries The Pacific, produced by Steven Spielberg, and most recently worked as a writer and Executive Producer on the HBO series Treme. Pelecanos lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is at work on his next novel.

Reviews
The coolest writer in America * GQ *
His books will burn into your brain like no others * WASHINGTON POST *
Author of over 18 critically lauded novels...his reputation rests on a bedrock of tight, fast-paced prose, meticulous plotting, finely tuned characters and an incredible authenticity in depicting time and place...This is a writer in full control of his material and fully understanding of his strengths. Lovers of crime fiction should not miss what he has to say * IRISH EXAMINER *
As aficionados of THE WIRE will attest, Pelecanos is a peerless chronicler of the black urban underclass...entertainingly rewarding * SUNDAY EXPRESS on What It Was *
THE WIRE writer George Pelecanos has a way with words that only seems to be getting meaner and swankier * METRO *



Book Information
ISBN 9781409127079
Author George Pelecanos
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Orion (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )
Publisher Orion Publishing Co
Weight(grams) 224g
Dimensions(mm) 197mm * 131mm * 20mm