Without a wasted word or hint of judgment, George Pelecanos presents an episode of deadly teenage racial violence and its impact on the six boys involved. The event occurs in the 70’s in an African-American D.C. suburb and is revisited thirty-five years later when two of the participants attempt reconciliation.Three white teenagers, Alex Pappas, Bill Cachoris, and Pete Whitten, cruise into a Montgomery County black neighborhood, throw a pie and shout racial epithets at three black kids drinking and talking outside a storefront. The white kids, finding themselves on a dead end street, are forced to turn the car around, and the black teens (brothers Raymond and James Monroe, and a thug, Charles Baker) are ready.
The fight leaves Whitten unharmed and free to prosper, Pappas beaten and disfigured, and Chicoris dead. James Monroe, framed by Baker, serves a long prison sentence. Raymond, his brother, escapes jail time and becomes a physical therapist. Baker, imprisoned multiple times, continues his criminal career.
Pappas recovers from his injuries with the exception of scarring around his eyes and eventually takes over his father’s coffee shop. As a gesture in memory of his youngest son who was killed in Iraq, he delivers and donates pies to the wounded at Walter Reed Medical Center. Raymond Monroe, whose son is serving in Afghanistan, works at Walter Reed and recognizes Pappas. The two men form a fragile alliance in order to find some resolution and growth based on the senseless incident from their youth. However, Charles Baker has other ideas. Currently shaking down small time drug dealers, he plans to extort deadly revenge on the two white survivors and their families.
This searing novel is a must read for customers who like books by Richard Price and Andrew Vachss and for fans of The Wire, Homicide: Life on the Street, and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighborhood.
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