{"id":639,"date":"2012-02-23T07:28:02","date_gmt":"2012-02-23T14:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=639"},"modified":"2012-02-23T07:28:02","modified_gmt":"2012-02-23T14:28:02","slug":"the-unkindest-cut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=639","title":{"rendered":"The unkindest cut?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apologies for the headline, but Bob Moyer so often toys with puns and literary allusions that he incites others to try the same.<\/p>\n

In this review, the inimitable Bob amuses us by commenting wryly (?) upon our nation\u2019s capital while reviewing a \u201cgritty, atmospheric\u201d novel set in that city\u2019s \u201csleazy streets.\u201d More good news: George Pelecanos, the author whose \u201criveting\u201d prose has so entertained Bob, is a prolific writer of books as well as acclaimed TV series.<\/p>\n

Just in case anybody wonders about Bob\u2019s fascination with the mean streets of various literary haunts, I\u2019ll throw this in: I\u2019ve seen Bob\u2019s house. It\u2019s on a nice, tree-lined street. Not mean at all.<\/p>\n

By Robert Moyer<\/p>\n

THE\u00a0 CUT. By George Pelecanos. Little, Brown. 292 pages. $25.99<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>George Pelecanos wrote and produced the gritty, atmospheric scripts for the TV series Wired<\/em>; he now writes gritty, atmospheric scripts for Treme<\/em>, an HBO series.\u00a0 Well-received by both critics and viewers, each one of these dramas takes the viewers places they would otherwise not have seen.<\/p>\n

Some may be surprised that Pelecanos has been producing gritty atmospheric dramas for years \u2014 on paper.\u00a0 He has been guiding readers through the tackier parts of his hometown haunt of Washington, D.C., in a series of acclaimed novels. (Wait\u2014is there a less tacky side of D.C.? Oh well. …) His treatises on the evil men do to each other around dark corners and down dark alleys have riveted readers to the page, just as his pixilated prose has done on the screen.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s come up with a new guide through the sleazy streets of D.C. (Yes, I know, I know, aren\u2019t they all?)\u00a0 Spero Lucas, a young veteran just returned from Iraq, doesn\u2019t fit in with any crowd; college doesn\u2019t fit someone who\u2019s been to the University of Baghdad, as they call it.\u00a0He has found a niche,\u00a0however.\u00a0 His observational skills, honed in\u00a0scouting patrols overseas, earn him a job scouring crime scenes for a defense attorney\u2019s clients.\u00a0While working for one of those clients, a local incarcerated crime boss, he gets an offer to recover some \u201cproduct\u201d that has disappeared en route.\u00a0The crime boss can\u2019t get out to do anything, so he offers Spero The Cut<\/em> of the title, a cut of whatever he gets back.\u00a0 And, as the narration says, \u201c\u2026the truck began to roll downhill.\u201d<\/p>\n

What a trip it is!\u00a0 As Spero careens into danger, Pelecanos pins down a sense of place with his prose as few other writers can. A cop car cruising the wrong neighborhood, a car cutting him off a little too close, a young man who won\u2019t make eye contact, all out on the streets that Pelecanos has obviously prowled for years.\u00a0Even more riveting is the brutal fight that forces Spero to use every ounce of his combat skills to overcome his attacker. (Not too far into a Pelecanos novel one begins to wonder about walking the Washington streets.)<\/p>\n

Pelecanos sprinkles just enough personal detail along the way to give Spero a dynamic beyond his detecting skills. The adopted son of a Greek family whose adoptive brother is black, he spends time with his widowed mom and the aforementioned brother, a high-school English teacher.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t have trouble finding women; he just can\u2019t seem to keep them coming back.\u00a0In other words, he\u2019s the typical hard-boiled hero \u2014 lucky in the street, unlucky in love.\u00a0Watching him work the streets and women of D.C. will be a pleasure in the books to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apologies for the headline, but Bob Moyer so often toys with puns and literary allusions that he incites others to try the same. In this review, the inimitable Bob amuses us by commenting wryly (?) upon our nation\u2019s capital while reviewing a \u201cgritty, atmospheric\u201d novel set in that city\u2019s \u201csleazy streets.\u201d More good news: George […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[210,207,208,209],"class_list":["post-639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thriller-suspense","tag-dc","tag-pelecanos","tag-thriller","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=639"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":641,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions\/641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}