Pelecanos is a highly acclaimed thriller writer who bases his novels in Washington DC, the home of one of America's worst trained and inefficient police forces. In this one, a white police officer shoots an off-duty fellow cop, who just happens to be black. An investigation clears the perpetrator, but doubts linger.
Derek Strange, a black ex-officer who runs his own private detective agency in downtown Washington, is hired to clear up these doubts. In a bizarre twist of fate, the accused man, one Terry Quinn, joins the agency and becomes part of the inquiry. Quinn is an ambiguous character and is unsure of his motives in the affair. The dark side of his personality revels in the brutal side of police work, and he may also harbour racist tendencies. Together Strange and Quinn - two sides of the one coin, perhaps - delve into the affair, in the process throwing unwanted light on the city's flourishing drug trade and coming up against some pretty evil thugs involved in it. Pelecanos knows his territory well, writes a vivid and street-wise prose, and his cast of characters seems true to life. He paints a pretty unsavoury picture, though, of the political capital of the US.
Mystic River. By Dennis Lehane. Bantam Press. £9.99 in UK
Set in the Boston area, home of Robert B. Parker's sleuth, Spenser, Lehane's stories are more darkly psychological and intricately plotted than Parker's lightweight, private-eye tales.
This one begins in 1975, when three boys, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle, are 11 years old. A car approaches them as they play in the street, and Boyle is enticed in and driven off. The consequences of this event come back to haunt all three some 25 years on, when Marcus's daughter is found murdered and Boyle is looked on as the chief suspect. By now, Devine is a homicide detective, while Marcus has gone in the opposite direction and is a minor criminal, with aspirations to climbing the ladder to the big time.
Devine is assigned to the case, but Marcus is determined to find the perpetrator and exact his own retribution. Both are on a collision course, and the resulting mayhem brings violence to the neighbourhood. More than just a "bang-bang" thriller, Lehane's novel shades in deeper nuances, especially the manner in which incidents in the past can influence the future. Mystic River may be definitively brutal, but it is also satisfyingly thoughtful.
Echo Burning. By Lee Child. Bantam Press. £9.99 in UK
I have always found it passing strange when British writers pen thriller novels in the American mode, and vice versa. Elizabeth George is the American who comes to mind, with her cosy mystery stories set in the traditional English countryside, while Lee Child has gone in the opposite direction with his Jack Reacher books. This time, ex-military policeman Reacher is footloose and fancy free down Texas way. Along comes a beautiful Mexican woman, Carmen Greer, in her air-conditioned Cadillac. She picks him up and then asks him to kill her brutal husband, Sloop. Most people would be out of there like a shot off a shovel, but Reacher accompanies Carmen back to the Greer ranch, where he is soon up to his armpits in trouble. But Reacher, "...a giant, six-five, heavily built, close to two hundred and fifty pounds", is used to danger, and he is soon sorting out Carmen's woes, sometimes with finesse, more often with the heavy hand of Old Testament justice. If you like thrillers of the bang-wallop variety, with a nice bit of plotting thrown in, then this is the one for you.
Flint. By Paul Eddy. Headline. £10 in UK
This book, a first novel, introduces undercover cop Grace Flint, as tough as nails and with a line in scatological invective second to none. However, when she comes up against big-time criminal Frank Harling, she gets more than she bargained for, and ends up with her face mutilated. Restored to a glacial beauty by cosmetic surgery, she sets out to gain revenge, in the process tracking Harling halfway round the world. Flint is a novel of the Ian Fleming school, all shine and outward show, with not a lot behind it all. But on that superficial level it is quite enjoyable. One for the beach or the long-haul flight.
House of Corrections. By Doug J. Swanson. No Exit Press Paperback. £6.99 in UK
Now this one I recommend unreservedly. It is the fifth, and hopefully not the final, novel in the Golden Dagger award-winning "Jack Flippo" series, and is most definitely up to the standards of the other four. Flippo is an anarchic private detective residing most of the time in Dallas, Texas, as hard-boiled as they come and with an outlook on life bordering on the surreal. Answering a plea for help from former friend Wesley Joy - once upon a time they worked together as prosecutors in the Dallas legal system - Flippo becomes entangled in a web of money, drugs, sex, renegade DEA agents, an Elmore Leonard-type psychopath, and a beautiful, if demented, female reporter. I read this in one sitting. Pure joy!
Michael Painter is a writer and critic