Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go

Welcome to the unlit bleakness of grunge crime fiction. Nick Stefanos
(Nick's Trip) inhabits D.C.'s most squalid streets, tending bar, boozing
for free, wasting his 30s and dating a girl with a taste for the sauce
to rival his. One night, out on a bender and nearly passed out, he hears
a murder being committed and decides to find the killers (how a guy
this hammered can later remember so much is cheerfully glossed over).
Nick gets himself an alarmingly straight-arrow partner and dives
headlong into the underbelly of the porn trade. Two young black men have
been dealing drugs and selling their bodies; one is dead, and the other
is missing. Stefanos only pauses to drink, listen to music by bands
with whom only the hippest readers will be familiar and have a few bouts
of desperate sex. Although his innumerable descriptions of bars and
boozing might leave some bored (or queasy), Pelecanos joins company with
James Ellroy, Andrew Vachss and Jack O' Connell in extending the
noirest tones of crime fiction. Here, he unleashes a lacerating view of
urban angst and degradation.