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Audiobook10 hours
The Sweet Forever: A Novel
Written by George Pelecanos
Narrated by Cary Hite
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
A bold, brilliant tale of mystery, revenge, and survival in the 1980s, when cocaine and money ruled the city streets and even the good guys wanted a piece of the action. It's March madness and the college boys are playing basketball on TV. But on the streets of D.C., the homeboys are dealing, dissing, dying. From behind plate glass, with an 80s backbeat pounding in his brain, Marcus Clay watches it all happen, and prays that he can make a go with his downtown record store. Then a car comes careening down U Street, and what Marcus sees next will plunge him into the middle of a war.
A drug runner is decapitated in the crash. A bystander--a white boy desperate to buy a woman's love--snatches a bag of cash from the wreck, and a prince of crime wants it back. For Marcus's buddy, Dimitri Karras, the mayhem is a chance to make a score. For a pair of dirty cops it's a chance to get free. And for dozens of lives swept up into the maelstrom, it's just another springtime in America's capital, where the game is played for keeps.
A drug runner is decapitated in the crash. A bystander--a white boy desperate to buy a woman's love--snatches a bag of cash from the wreck, and a prince of crime wants it back. For Marcus's buddy, Dimitri Karras, the mayhem is a chance to make a score. For a pair of dirty cops it's a chance to get free. And for dozens of lives swept up into the maelstrom, it's just another springtime in America's capital, where the game is played for keeps.
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Author
George Pelecanos
George P. Pelecanos is the author of nine richly praised crime novels set in and around Washington D.C., including Hell to Pay, Right as Rain, The Sweet Forever, Shame the Devil, King Suckerman, and The Big Blowdown.
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Reviews for The Sweet Forever
Rating: 3.982556046511628 out of 5 stars
4/5
86 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It feels odd to review a novel 13 years after its publication, but as I'm working my way through George Pelecanos' extensive catalog, I guess it's bound to happen. This is yet another example of his ability to take an incident that is just a part of life in a major city, a traffic accident, and create a masterful story about what really happened and its repercussions.
I won't go into the plot, which I'm sure you can glean from the product description on this site. What I like to do when I review is to compare a book to the mental checklist I have on what I like in the particular genre. I also like to determine if there's anything distinctive that makes it stand out or reminds me of other authors or novels.
The coolest thing The Sweet Forever has going for it is that it's like opening a time capsule of the mid-1980's. The author does a great job evoking the music, clothing, hairstyles, drug use, etc. from that era. As with his other novels, Pelecanos uses his encyclopedic knowledge of popular music to great effect, and it truly produces an aural soundtrack for the story line. He incorporates music heavily into most (all? don't know, haven't finished the lot) of his books, but this time it seems a little different just because of the '80s time slice for the story.
The story is believable and the characters react in predictably unpredictable ways. The dialogue is crisp and life-like, which is one of the author's great strengths. In a lot of ways he reminds me of another favorite, Elmore Leonard- he really 'owns' the genre in a city (Leonard in Detroit, GP in DC), he writes great dialogue, his stories aren't about FBI mastermind crime solvers going after criminal masterminds but more about 'blue collar' lower-level street criminals. I think the thing I like best about him is that he creates characters that are really in the 'grey area'.... the good guys aren't really all that good, the bad guys have some redeeming qualities (at least some of them), the cops have seemingly the same good-to-evil continuum, and there's a number of side characters that contribute color and depth.
This is another Pelecanos gem that I can't recommend highly enough.