Hell to Pay

Customer Reviews

• Pay any price for this stunning book.  Feb 15, 2002 (8 of 8 found this helpful)

  Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, the salt and pepper detective team first introduced in "Right as Rain" (2000), are back in another stellar mystery from one of the very best writers of contemporary fiction. Forget about the milquetoast scribblers who pop up on Oprah; authors like Pelecanos are where the quality really is.

  In the hands of a less-skilled writer, this unlikely duo would seem forced and false, an interracial pair thrown together because it's contemporary and PC. Pelecanos couldn't care less about that, though. Strange and Quinn are together because it works; their skills and personalities not only complement each other, their pairing allows them to access both sides of D.C.'s color divide. Even more than that, these two very different men have gradually, reluctantly formed a real friendship.

  Pelecanos does so many things well in his books. The action, the suspense, the dialogue are all breathtakingly sharp. He even provides the soundtrack to his story, music selected to demonstrate his characters moods and attitudes.

  It's amazing to me that Pelecanos isn't a bigger name in the mystery field than he is. Maybe his work is too dark or too gritty for the mainstream audience. It certainly is not the result of a lack of quality. You will find few better than him.

  Reviewed by David Montgomery, MysteryInkOnline.com

• D.C.'s Other Department of Justice  Mar 10, 2002 (5 of 5 found this helpful)

  P.I. Derek strange is back with Janine and her son Lionel as well as Terry Quinn from "Right As Rain" who is helping him coach Pee Wee football and doing some investigating on the side. It opens with bad guy Garfield "Death" Potter at a pit bull fight (he's so bad he later shoots the losing dog) browbeating a guy to tell him where to find Lorenze Wilder who owes him $100. Strange appears when he meets Susan Tracy and Karen Bagley, two ex-cops now running a detective agency that finds runaways and helps hookers.

  Tracy and Bagley hire Quinn to track down a 14-year-old runaway who is controlled by pimp Worldwide Wilson. Terry screws up the snatch, Susan bails him out and they become a hot item in the aftermath.

  On a parallel story line, Potter and co. kill Lorenze and his nephew Joe on their way home from Pee Wee football practice. Lorenze's sister has been raising Joe on her own, never telling him who his father is. He's a force that will figure into the rest of the story.

  Though 2/3 of D.C. homicides go unsolved, ther are enough clues and enough interest to get Joe Wilder's killers. Strange gets to Potter before the cops do. At the same time Terry is going after Worldwide who beat up Stella the working girl who tipped them to the runaway.

  The two parallel showdowns are a stretch, but Pelecanos has a great way of letting justice be done. In the end the reader knows what happened to whom and is still left to speculate how Pelecanos expects the criminal justic system to clean things up.

  Enough loose ends for a sequel? I hope so! Pelecanos never disappoints.

• Powerful  Feb 26, 2002 (10 of 12 found this helpful)

  Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, who were introduced to us in Right As Rain, return for a second gruelling case that once again takes them (and us) through the sleazy, dangerous backstreets of Washington DC.

  Strange is a middle aged black private investigator who is essentially a good man who has to deal with all manner of low-lifes, and consequently is forced to do things that weigh heavily on his mind. Hell To Pay focuses on Strange's devotion to the black youth living in the projects of Washington. He is determined to give them every possible chance to make something of themselves by building self-esteem and confidence.

  Furthering the youth theme and, in a way, counterbalancing all his good work, are the two cases that Strange and Quinn work on throughout the book. The first involves a fourteen year old prostitute and their attempts to get her off the streets and back home to her family. The second is the investigation of the murder of a child. This becomes a much more emotional case that turns personal, with Strange walking a moral tightrope.

  Once again, Pelecanos has delivered a powerful story that graphically portrays the mean streets and dangerous characters of modern day society. Although relentlessly illustrating the everyday tragedy surrounding us all, there is at least an underlying tone of hope.

• Hell to read  Jan 2, 2008 (6 of 7 found this helpful)

  I picked this book up because I am a big fan of The Wire, a TV series that Pelecanos serves as a head writer for. I was hoping for a great crime novel with overlapping plotlines, memorable characters and thought-provoking themes like the TV series. Instead I got a boring, disjointed novel full of tripe dialogue, gratuitous refrences to music that the author probably cribbed off the Billboard top 100, boring moralizing, and lousy sex scenes.
  His hereos and villians are one dimensional in the extreme and his use of slang is at-times ludicrously incorrect. As an example I'll focus on the mecahnics of the drug trade described in the novel. The main villian, Garfield 'Death' Potter, is a big time 'hydro' dealer, but doesn't appear to have any sort of hydroponic marijuana operation set up (there's a reason it's called 'hydro'), relies on a midget street dealer to distribute dimes and nicks, and spends most of his time in the novel stealing cars and shooting recalitrant customers (and since when can you find an 'oz' for $100 on the east coast?). What kind of drug dealer is that? A bad one that would definitely not be running the streets of DC. If this were real life, as Pelecanos would obviously like to have the reader believe, Potter would barely be making his money back or in debt to dealers that actually knew what they were doing. I felt like I was reading an after-school special from the early-90s.
  Worse, I think Pelecanos thinks he is saying something important with this book, and he constantly tries to remind readers that young people have no respect for life because they listen to rap music instead of classic soul and "blues-metal." The novel is trite in the extreme. Stick to The Wire.

• One of the best of the year  Mar 5, 2004 (3 of 3 found this helpful)

  One of today's finest writers of crime fiction is George Pelecanos. He has previously written the "Washington quartet"-- a group of books, actually historical mysteries, that took place over a number of years and shared characters. His latest series concerns PIs Derek Strange and Terry Quinn. Strange started Strange Investigations and hired Quinn, a retired police officer. I considered the first book in the series, RIGHT AS RAIN, to be one of the best books of last year.
  Several separate plots are occurring simultaneously. Strange and Quinn are hired to recover a fourteen year old girl working as a prostitute for Worldwide Wilson, a hardened operative. One of the problems is that the girl does not want to go home. Another plot concerns three homicidal young men who want to knock off a man who owes them money. The man is an uncle to one of the boys playing on Strange's youth football team that he coaches. When the boy becomes involved, Strange and Quinn want vengeance.
  HELL TO PAY is another sterling example of what makes George Pelecanos one of the best. He is a master of characters and dialogue. They reflect the highly realistic milieu of the nation's capital where this series takes place. He successfully balances these superb characterizations with a truly riveting plot. The book is also just the right size. Other practitioners of the crime fiction art would do very well to read and learn from this very, very fine writer. One of the best of the year.