Washington, D.C.’s bookstores give plenty of prominence to the annual spawn of the political hack class: the typical mélange of ghostwritten autobiographies from self-serving electoral wannabes and the soft-headed journalist pastries who whore for their leavings. D.C., like other oft-abbreviated urban destinations, is an industry town, and these tomes regularly and successfully find their way out of the stores nestled in the arms of consumers. But long after these books moulder as the coffee table jockey of choice among those who imagine themselves connected, the city’s readers keep on cracking the spines and dog-earing the pages of books that speak of characters that you’ll never see on any subcommittee. Men like Derek Strange, Nick Stefanos, Terry Quinn and Marcus Clay.

Those men are some of the re-occurring characters found in the work of George Pelecanos, an author who’s every bit as synonymous with Washington as anyone who ever rode electoral favor into one of those whited sepulchers of government. Pelecanos has spent his career writing about private detectives, beat cops, and the urban underworld of the D.C. area, and is rightfully considered the equal of the titans of the genre. But what places him closer to the heart of Washington’s readers is the way he’s used his novels as a lovingly researched and carefully crafted catalogue of D.C.’s history. With an intimate knowledge of the city’s nooks and crannies, Pelecanos is a street-level chronicler of changing neighborhoods and shifting trends.