Owning Up

George Pelecanos is such a wonderful writer—word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph—that you can finish any of these stories only to wonder: how did I get here so fast? In these four novellas, Pelecanos mines familiar territory—Washington D.C. and Baltimore—areas he has explored in his 20-plus novels and as a film and television producer and writer who has worked on the HBO series The Wire, Treme, and more. In the first story, “The Amusement Machine,” two men—one white, Ira; and one Black, Jerrod—meet at a book group in jail and form a tentative friendship that extends beyond prison. Until a foolhardy act on Ira’s part, which nearly implicates Jerrod, seemingly destroys whatever relationship they might have. In “The No-Knock,” a family’s home is invaded by the police operating under a no-knock warrant, which allows the cops to force entry without identifying themselves. They are seeking one of the teenage sons, Vince, who eventually turns himself in, guilty of robbing a marijuana dealer. But while the son never again engages in criminal activities, the violence and disruption of the home invasion is something the father can never get past, with it haunting him for the rest of his life. Novellas are great for book groups, especially today when people are often intimidated by a 300-page novel, but crime fiction offers few novella choices. This collection is one of the very best.