Soul Circus (Derek Strange & Terry Quinn Series #3) »

A devotee of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, George P. Pelecanos has honed his street-smart style with a series of detective thrillers all set in the seamier corners of the D.C./Maryland/Virginia triangle.

A Washington D.C. crime overlord is fighting for his life in court. Two younger dealers are fighting for territory, prestige, and millions of dollars in future profits. It takes only one slip-a kid going out of control with a rented pistol-to push friction closer to wholesale slaughter.

The Washington Post

What's so brilliant about Soul Circus, and Pelecanos's novels in general, is that he raises these questions not only in meditative passages (such as when Strange wonders how he ever lucked into the joys of a good marriage and fatherhood) but also in scenes of the rawest violence. In the space of a couple of paragraphs toward the middle of the novel, four gang members suddenly die in bloody, balletic sequence, and you find yourself reeling from the senselessness of their deaths, the waste of their stupid lives. Ditto for the ending of this superb novel, which shoves readers into an unwanted audience with the awful silence at the center of things. — Maureen Corrigan