Derek Strange and Terry Quinn are ex cops turned private detectives in Washington, DC. Hired to investigate the death of an off duty black police officer at the hands of a white policeman, Strange and Quinn are faced with the institutionalised racism of the nation's most poorly trained and dangerous police force. As the two private detectives confront the degradation of the city's flourishing drug trade, they find themselves up against some of the most implacable, dead eyed killers ever to grace the pages of a novel. In Right As Rain George Pelecanos introduces a memorable new pair of characters into the grittily real Washington DC landscape which has led to him being acclaimed as 'A great writer' (The Times) who 'deserves to be listed among the best' (Observer)

Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, the team of private investigators who made their stunning debut in Right as Rain, are hired to find a 14-year-old white girl from the suburbs who’s run away from home and is now working as a prostitute in some dangerous neighborhoods. The two ex-cops think they know the dangers, but nothing in their experience has prepared them for Worldwide Wilson, the pimp whose territory they are intruding upon. The situation is compounded when one of the young stars of a community pee-wee football team – which Strange and Quinn spend their evenings coaching – is killed by a drug dealer while riding in a car with his uncle. Tracking down his killers becomes a point of honor for Strange and Quinn, and their off-the-Books investigation leads them back to Wilson. Soon, the two detectives are forced to sort through the pieces of evidence to put together the puzzle and solve the crime. Combining inimitable neighborhood flavor, action scenes that rank among the best in fiction, and a clear-eyed view of morality in a world with few rules, Hell to Pay is another Pelecanos masterpiece to be savored

Soul Circus starts with a rented gun and moves into the vacuum created by the imprisonment of a D.C. crime lord. Two young dealers are fighting for the now unclaimed territory, prestige, and millions of dollars in future profits. Now the kid brother of one of those dealers is going to escalate the friction into wholesale slaughter. Private investigators Derek Strange and Terry Quinn have found a woman whose testimony could prove the difference between a death sentence and a return to the streets for the crime lord. First they have to get her to talk. Then, they have to keep her alive

Derek Strange is a rookie cop, the job he’s dreamed of since he was a boy. His brother, Dennis, has not been as fortunate; home from the service with a disability pension and zero prospects, he is man with good intentions but bad habits. Derek has always looked out for Dennis, but no amount of brotherly love can save him from the dangerous world of Alvin Jones, a local bottom-feeder, hustler, and stone killer who draws him into his web of violence. While the rookie cop navigates the rocky terrain of a city in turmoil, a family in crisis, and his love for a woman he has driven away, Frank Vaughn, a cop at the opposite end of his career, investigates the vicious hit and run of a young black man. Vaughn’s personal life is a shambles, but he’s good police; he pursues the killers with sharklike intent. Meanwhile, in Memphis, a prophet is murdered, igniting a volcanic chain of events that will leave the nation’s capital burned, divided, and decimated, forever changing the lives of its working-class inhabitants. Two cops struggling to do their jobs against the backdrop of a violent uprising: Their paths collide in the middle of a full-fury revolution, in an electrifying climax to the most powerful book yet from George Pelecanos, “the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world” (Esquire), who “writes with intelligence and complexity, as well as with a sober recognition of the evil at large in the world” (Washington Post)

Washington, D.C., 1972. Derek Strange has left the police department and set up shop as a private investigator. His former partner, Frank “Hound Dog” Vaughn, is still on the force. When a young woman comes to Strange asking for his help recovering a cheap ring she claims has sentimental value, the case leads him onto Vaughn’s turf, where a local drug addict’s been murdered, shot point-blank in his apartment. Soon both men are on the trail of a ruthless killer: Red Fury, so called for his looks and the car his girlfriend drives, but a name that fits his personality all too well. Red Fury doesn’t have a retirement plan, as Vaughn points out — he doesn’t care who he has to cross, or kill, to get what he wants. As the violence escalates and the stakes get higher, Strange and Vaughn know the only way to catch their man is to do it their own way. Rich with details of place and time — the cars, the music, the clothes — and fueled by non-stop action, this is Pelecanos writing in the hard-boiled noir style that won him his earliest fans and placed him firmly in the ranks of the top crime writers in America