Hell to Pay: A Novel Summary and Reviews

Hell to Pay: A Novel
by George P. Pelecanos

Hell to Pay: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: George P. Pelecanos
Edition: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2002-02-28
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown

Book Reviews of Hell to Pay: A Novel

Book Review: Hell to read
Summary: 1 Stars

I picked this book up because I am a big fan of The Wire, a TV series that Pelecanos serves as a head writer for. I was hoping for a great crime novel with overlapping plotlines, memorable characters and thought-provoking themes like the TV series. Instead I got a boring, disjointed novel full of tripe dialogue, gratuitous refrences to music that the author probably cribbed off the Billboard top 100, boring moralizing, and lousy sex scenes.
His hereos and villians are one dimensional in the extreme and his use of slang is at-times ludicrously incorrect. As an example I'll focus on the mecahnics of the drug trade described in the novel. The main villian, Garfield 'Death' Potter, is a big time 'hydro' dealer, but doesn't appear to have any sort of hydroponic marijuana operation set up (there's a reason it's called 'hydro'), relies on a midget street dealer to distribute dimes and nicks, and spends most of his time in the novel stealing cars and shooting recalitrant customers (and since when can you find an 'oz' for $100 on the east coast?). What kind of drug dealer is that? A bad one that would definitely not be running the streets of DC. If this were real life, as Pelecanos would obviously like to have the reader believe, Potter would barely be making his money back or in debt to dealers that actually knew what they were doing. I felt like I was reading an after-school special from the early-90s.
Worse, I think Pelecanos thinks he is saying something important with this book, and he constantly tries to remind readers that young people have no respect for life because they listen to rap music instead of classic soul and "blues-metal." The novel is trite in the extreme. Stick to The Wire.

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