Right as Rain: Noir Novels for Walter Mosley Fans

Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Staff Picks , Fiction

George P. Pelecanos is a writer who makes me think of Walter Mosley for the amazing vividness of his writing.  You can feel the grit under the soles of your shoes as you walk down these fictional mean streets, and the dialogue is so pitch perfect you can just hear it sing off the page.  People who like noir crime fiction really shouldn’t miss Pelecanos’ work.

His books are set in Washington, DC, in the Greek-American and African-American communities there.  The same characters show up in many of the novels, so it can be hard to find a place to start reading.  Try his new novel, The Night Gardener, or if one book is not enough (and it won't be!), start with one of his recent series, beginning with Right as Rain. 

Right as Rain features Derek Strange, who is a middle-aged, African-American p.i. and long-ago former cop.  Strange is asked to help clear the good name of another police officer, Chris Wilson, who was raked through the press after a police shooting.  But Wilson wasn’t the shooter, he was the victim—a young, black cop who was shot to death by a young white cop, Terry Quinn, when Quinn found Wilson off-duty, standing with his gun over the body of a white man. 

Strange’s investigation into the death brings him into contact with Quinn, who has quit the force in spite of having been cleared on the shooting.  What surprises both of them is how easily they get along, even though Quinn believes that his shoot was justified, and Strange knows that Quinn never would have shot if Wilson had been white.  Of course, things aren’t as simple as they appear.  Something else was going on at the confused crime scene, and together the two men work to discover what it was.  They partner up in a later case as well.

This is one of the recent series debuts we put on our list of great new mystery series 2000-2005.  There's lots of good stuff there.