Drama City is my introduction to homegrown DC crime writer George Pelecanos, and I am mightily impressed. The crime plot is good , the characters very solid (a paroled felon trying to go straight as an animal-control officer, his very sympathetic and secretly sex-addicted female parole officer), it meshes mightily halfway through and I couldn't put it down -- but it's the Washington DC landscape Pelecanos paints that is most impressive. The Georgia Avenue-Petworth-Shaw corridor geographical and sociological detail which he provides are mesmerizing. Having just finished Richard Price's monumental Lush Life, about criminals and wannabes and yuppies and tired cops on Manhattan's lower East Side, it was easy for me to peg Pelecano's as our own Price.
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