(2 of 2)
Gus Ramone and Doc Holiday were still rookie cops when dead kids began appearing in D.C. gardens with a bullet hole in their temple and someone else's DNA where it should not be. Twenty years later, Ramone is a homicide detective and Holiday a limo driver (forced out on a morals charge by his ex-partner) when a new body turns up that fits the old M.O. Pelecanos has mellowed in his 14th novel--he's less gratuitously violent, more attuned to emotional subtext--but his prose has lost none of its street cred or bite. A ghetto bully who passes as a Jamaican drug lord is actually "as American as folding money and war."