|
Loading...
LibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendationsLoading...
won't like
will probably not like
will probably like
will like
will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This one is basically the end of the Strange/Quinn books (though there is one more featuring a young Derek Strange). Featuring major drug dealing operations, random violence hitting major characters and our heroes turning out to be at least as troublesome as the villains, this is the one, you can really see the Wire scripting that Pelecanos would go on to do. Recommend. (  ) atthesametime | Jan 4, 2009 |  The blurb on this book raves about how it is "brilliant" "tremendous" and it is written by "a great writer in any genre" and "a modern master of American crime writing." Well, sorry, I found this book hard to read, and none of those things. The crime genre in print isn't really my thing, although I do enjoy some crime dramas on TV. In this book, the characters are cardboard, shuffled about in response to the rather wooden and really quite predictable plot. Even the moments of high drama and/or fast action were slow, grey and bland. In fact, if you obsess over cars, clothes and guns you might like this: the cars were far more clearly described characters than the people, and several of the people obsess over clothes to the point that they're simply a clothes horse. Similarly for the guns. I live a long way from Washington, a long way from gang culture, and a long way from the ghetto. There are books I've read that have made me understand, to a lesser or greater extent equally different current cultures (the life of a black hip-hop star from the ghetto for example): this book didn't even manage that. It's as if the ghetto and the gangs, rather than being vibrant, living things adding to the story were flat, dead scenery in front of which the cut out figures were moved, rather like a child's cardboard theatre. (  ) lewispike | May 23, 2008 | Soul Circus is the second book I've read by Pelecanos, and I'm starting to find that he's becoming my new favorite crime/mystery writer. It's largely because he writes about DC, but it's not just that. He writes very realistically; I've known people who are exactly as he describes them. The mistakes people make that set them on the wrong path, how people get caught up in their own lives and can't see a way out; it's all here. The novel is one of those starring protagonist Derek Strange, an ex-cop who does private investigation work. As seems to be typical for Pelecanos, the novel isn't about one story, it's about several intersecting plot lines that you can see connecting until the very end of the novel. All involve violence and tragedy, but there's also hope in the tale Pelecanos is telling. It's a great read; gritty and honest about inner city life ( ) bibliophool | May 16, 2008 | He draws a strong picture, and there are good people as well as bad, but there was a lot of ugliness and foreboding, and a heavily forecast death, so I didn't enjoy it all that much. franoscar | Jan 2, 2008 | Suggestion from Library Thing  jdbwishlist | Dec 10, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0446611425, Mass Market Paperback)George Pelecanos's Washington, D.C., is a place rife with high-living drug dealers, easily obtained guns, and a generation depleted by ignorance, excessive machismo, and misplaced trust in the equalizing power of violence. Yet PI Derek Strange "did love D.C.," as Pelecanos acknowledges in Soul Circus, his third novel (after Right as Rain and Hell to Pay) to feature this mid-50s black detective and his younger white partner, Terry Quinn. Strange's optimism may be running at even higher gear than normal here, following his marriage to his longtime secretary, Janine Baker, and his determination to be a good stepfather to her son.Picking up where Hell to Pay left off, we find Strange working in Soul Circus on behalf of Granville Oliver, a manipulative black mobster charged with murder and racketeering, who faces the death penalty. To help his client knock that sentence down to life imprisonment, Strange will have to find a nail salon worker named Devra Stokes, who used to be the girlfriend of Phillip Wood, a former associate of Oliver's and now the prosecution's chief witness against him. Stokes had sworn out an abuse complaint against Wood, and might testify that he was behind at least one of the killings Oliver is said to have planned. But, fearing for her own safety and that of her young son, she wants no part of Oliver's defense. Meanwhile, Quinn--against his better judgment--helps a homely, unpredictable gangsta-wannabe, Mario "Twigs" Durham, locate his girlfriend, who supposedly went missing, but in fact skipped out with his drug stash. Even as the threads of this yarn come together amid a deadly gang conflict, Pelecanos stays focused on his characters--not only his intriguingly troubled sleuths, but also a deftly nuanced cop-turned-gun dealer, Ulysses Foreman. Buttressed by Pelecanos's street-slangy prose, Soul Circus delivers an un-blindered perspective on urban life (and death) that manages to be both frightening and hopeful. Not so unlike the city in which it's set. --J. Kingston Pierce (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:04 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English (1)
