New George Pelecanos Novel, “The Cut”
I ran across this piece on the new George Pelecanos novel The Cut, reviewed by Jason Kuiper of the Omaha World-Herald. Pelecanos was one of the writers for The Wire, and also one of the show’s producers. He’s well known as a writer of dark, hard-boiled and gritty crime fiction, and as anyone who knows me is well aware…these are a few of my favorite things.
This new book begins a new series about a guy who retrieves things. I’ve never read any of Pelecanos’s books, but it definitely sounds like this new one is worth trying. Kuiper seems to like it. It sounds pretty bad-ass…with at least one tangible nod to John D. MacDonald, always a good sign. Here’s Kuiper:
Spero Lucas finds things. For a fee.
His going rate is 40 percent of whatever he’s asked to retrieve.
It’s his cut.
Lucas, a former Marine who is back home in Washington, D.C., after a deployment in Iraq, is the new series character by acclaimed writer George Pelecanos.
“The Cut” is Pelecanos’ 17th book. It’s his great return into grittier crime fiction after several novels that mainly focused on father-son relationships, with crimes in the background.
Not that such a focus was a bad thing. But with “The Cut,” crime is front and center — even though the relationships between Lucas and his deceased father and between a cop and the cop’s long-absent father loom over much of the novel.
With Lucas, Pelecanos has written a winning character, who is somewhat incomplete. He has room for growth and that will be part of the fun as this series unfolds.
Lucas works as an investigator for a defense attorney; he’s a private eye without the P.I. license.
A locked-up drug dealer, whose son Lucas had helped out of some legal trouble, sends word that he wants to hire Lucas to find $130,000 of missing “product.” Since Lucas likes to unwind at night by toking a little marijuana himself, he has no moral qualms about going to work for the dealer.
However, it doesn’t take long for Lucas to find trouble in the form of a dirty cop and some very bad men who put bullets in anyone who gets in their way.
[Link.]
