Soul Circus (Pelecanos, George) [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

With Soul Circus, George Pelecanos brings his sequence of novels about black Washington private eye Derek Strange and his partner Terry Quinn to the late 1990s and some sort of closure. The city they grew up in has changed but, as Strange continues to point out to the angry white Quinn, not as much as all that. It is just that asking the wrong question in the wrong tone of voice can be more dangerous when young men have guns and drug-fuelled short tempers. Young gangsters such as Strange's client Oliver have poisoned their own communities with heroin, crack and an equally addictive cult of machismo. Strange's work for Oliver is sparked by opposition to the death penalty, even for a creature like him.

Even more than usual with Pelecanos, this is a thriller with an agenda--we watch close-up how the availability of semi-legal guns becomes the occasion for a sequence of bloody deaths. This is an intelligent, wistful book that tries to understand violence as much as to condemn it. Strange has become one of the most interesting detectives in modern crime fiction simply because his conscience, his sense of history and his love of sweet soul music are so tightly intertwined. --Roz Kaveney -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

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

*Starred Review* Through 11 novels, Pelecanos has built a multifaceted fictional universe spanning more than 50 years but confined to the streets of Washington, D.C.'s, roughest neighborhoods. The characters in Pelecanos' world fall into distinct groups, but those groups are intermingled throughout individual books in Faulknerian fashion, with characters from the Nick Stefanos stories turning up in the Marcus Clay novels, or more recently, the Derek Strange-Terry Quinn series. That pattern continues here, in the third Strange-Quinn novel, with the appearance of Stefanos, hero of such early Pelecanos' novels as Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go (1995). Strange and Quinn once again find themselves struggling to save even one not-yet-lost young soul from the ravages of drugs and violence, but this time their knightly pursuits are undermined by a growing sense of moral ambivalence. Working as an investigator for the attorneys defending a gang leader faced with the death penalty, Strange questions whether his involvement in the case is justified by his position against capital punishment or whether he is merely trying to expunge his own guilt over his role in the death of the gang leader's father. Contrasting Strange's willingness to compromise with Quinn's potentially self-destructive hard-ass stance, Pelecanos expertly constructs both a gripping thriller and a tense internal drama. As always, his deeply textured portraits of the victims of poverty and violence add an almost Dickensian breadth to the novel. Throw in a shocking conclusion with far-reaching ramifications for the series, and you have one more superb installment in what has become a remarkably revealing portrait of urban life, encompassing both the broad sociopolitical questions and the most intimate matters of heart and mind. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

P.I. Strange protects a woman about to testify against a crime lord. The huge 20-city author tour suggests great expectations.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Darkly atmospheric crime fiction with strong characterisation and a compelling plot. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.