[amazon_link id=”0316078425″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]Author : George Pelecanos
Genre : Mystery/Crime/Thriller
Publisher : Little, Brown and Company
Rating : 3/5
Source : NetGalley Publisher ARC

“The Cut” is a police procedural style novel, in which it’s Iraqi war vet protagonist Spero Lucas does investigative work for a price; his finding fee is 40%. Lucas has been doing some work for lawyer Tom Petersen, and when he helps a client David Hawkins get acquitted, he’s called in for another job by the father Anwan Hawkins. Hawkins is a drug dealer, housed in the Washington D.C. jail, and wants Lucas to find certain missing drug deliveries. Lucas agrees, meets with Hawkin’s underlings and scouts out the land. The underlings soon die, and things go downhill from there.

This time I’ve gone and wandered into a book which looks like it’s written solely for an all male audience. Testosterone heavy, the book has as it’s hero Lucas – an athletic 29 year old who, besides doing excellent PI work, beds every second woman he meets. And we get to hear about it. All the women in the book (except his mother) are decorative “she was dark-haired, fully curved and effortlessly attractive”, and in the book solely to serve as Lucas’s sexual conquests.

As a PI novel, this book is interesting, but nothing out of the ordinary. Pelecanos’s writing style is spare and he conveys the action in fairly direct words. This is a procedural, because there is little mystery to it; Lucas follows a procedure – step after step after step, all of which is described in great detail.

Pelecanos also has a thing for describing clothes, music, food and eating places in great detail. He may not tell you what color Lucas’s skin is – Spero is the adopted son of Greek parents, some siblings are African-American and some Caucasian – but he does tell you about his clothes, his family, and his interests in food, music and women. There are many references to D.C. watering holes, which a D.C. familiar would enjoy. To me, they were just plain distracting.

I’ve got to say that this book didn’t work for me, primarily because I didn’t like Lucas too much. He seems a decent enough human being, although I found him morally ambiguous. As a potential hero, someone I, as a reader would root for, he fell short because I found his character suffering from the trappings of machismo and youth – the penchant to wear your masculinity on your sleeve. I also had trouble with the deprecatory tone towards females in the book.

Readers of the genre and Pelecanos fans will probably like this one. The rest : please proceed with caution.