George Pelecanos, the award-winning writer and producer of the HBO series, The Wire, gets better and better with each of his D.C. urban-noir crime novels. Ironically, in the seventeen years that he has been publishing, Pelecanos has become a big commercial success while at the same time he has become more literary in his writing, and is often compared to Zola and Dreiser on the basis of characters trapped by poverty, prejudice, and the iron grip of race. Despite the fatalism that pervades The Turnaround (Back Bay, $14.99), a narrative of a deadly encounter between suburban white teenagers and inner-city blacks, Pelecanos’s plot moves gingerly toward a reconciliation between individuals from each group. Publishers Weekly describes this novel as “a beautifully written and thought-provoking novel of crime, friendship, aging, and redemption.”
