This is the second installment in George Pelecanos's trilogy featuring Nick Stefanos, who lives in Washington, D.C. When last seen in A Firing Offense, Nick had left his job at Nutty Nathan's electronic store and had gotten his license as a P.I. Clients are few and far between, though, and so Nick takes a job as a bartender in a dive bar called the Spot where there's never a lack of clients.There's no lack of booze at the Spot either, and Nick seems in danger of watching his young life slip away in a sea of whiskey and a cloud of cigarette smoke. He has his music and a girlfriend of sorts, but that's about the sum of his life at the moment. Then one day, a long-lost friend named Billy Goodrich walks into the Spot. Back in the day, Nick and Billy were tight and once took an infamous road trip that Nick has never forgotten. It seems that Billy's wife, April, has disappeared and Billy wants Nick to find her. He insists that he just wants to know that she's OK.As Nick begins to dig into the case he discovers that April is not the only thing that's missing. She'd been seeing a small-time numbers runner named Joey DiGeordano who suddenly seems to be missing $200,000 that disappeared along with April.The plot begins to thicken and soon Nick and Billy are on another road trip into a rural area south of D.C., hot on April's trail. In the meantime, Nick has also agreed to look into the murder of a newspaper reporter named William Henry. The cops have written off the crime, but Henry was a friend and Nick refuses to let the murder go unsolved.As is always the case with a novel by George Pelecanos, the book is very atmospheric. All of the characters are well drawn; music infuses the story, and you can practically taste the liquor and smell the cigarette smoke. The search for April Goodrich is an interesting and colorful tale, and along the way, Nick learns a great deal about the nature and value of friendship.If I have any quarrel with the book, it would be that the second case, involving the murder of William Henry, seems tacked on to the plot and does not flow as smoothly as it might. One also wonders how anyone, even a person as young as Nick Stefanos, could possibly function at a reasonable level, given the amount of booze, cigarettes and dope he consumes during the course of the book. But these are minor complaints; in this book, as always, George Pelecanos demonstrates that he's a master of the craft and Nick's Trip is a great ride.
Nick Stefanos, newly licensed P.I., has discovered that just hanging out the shingle in the yellow pages is not enough to bring in hoards of customers, so to help pay the rent he hires out as a bartender to help make ends meet. That’s where his old drinking buddy, Billy Goodrich, finds him, hoping to secure Nick’s investigative services. It seems Billy’s wife, April, has run off and disappeared, ostensibly with Joey DiGiardano, son of an aging local crime boss. For old time’s sake, Nick takes the case, only to discover that Joey would like to find April, too; she made off with $200,000 of his money. At the same time, Nick wants to know why his friend William Henry, recently retired reporter was killed. The police put the murder in the context of a robbery, but Nick knows that can’t be the truth, because the security at William’s apartment building was just too good to let in just anyone. It had to be someone William knew. The trail leads to burned-out pizza shops and crooked cops even as he discovers that Billy has been lying to him about virtually everything. Pelecanos ranks up there with Jim Thompson, James Cain, and Raymond Chandler. Nick is of the classic, hard-boiled detective genre, and Pelancanos a pleasure to read. His writing is crisp and intelligent, laced with nice touches of humor. One evening, Nick squires a lesbian friend to her Christmas office party to help her fend off the lecherous accountants. Soon, he’s more than a little snookered but having a great time, constantly changing his profession and lifestyle for each person he meets. “And to shut down a guy who would not stop talking to me about his son’s high school football program, I proudly proclaimed, with a subtle flutter of my eyes, that I was studying to be a male nurse, explaining that I had chosen the profession ‘for the uniforms.’
What do You think about Nick's Trip (1999)?
This is the second novel in the Nick Stephanos trilogy, Nick is a former retail executive turned private investigator. Business on the PI front is pretty weak for Nick, and he is tending bar at a dive called The Spot in order to make ends meet. When a friend from his teenage years comes to the bar looking to hire Nick to find his estranged wife, Nick reluctantly takes on the case. It turns out that the wife had taken on with a local mob figure and then absconded with a large amount of money before disparaging. The race is on to find the wife before the cops or the crooks do. This was a down and dirty noir novel - Nick was a character from central casting: disheveled, alcoholic and chain smoking, yet he puts the pieces together, exposing a deadly double-cross. The character of the wife (who's name I can't remember) is fascinating. She never appears "on camera" as it were, but is responsible for all of the action and fulfills the role of the classic femme fatale. This worked well, Nick is a compelling anti-hero, and Pelecanos' writing style is appropriately lean. Fans of dark fiction will enjoy this and the trilogy as a whole.
—Tim Niland
Nick's Trip is grim and strong like Chandler. Pelecanos, to those who are familiar with The Wire is one of the Baltimore boys club that wrote for it in the early days. He has the sparse, pure style of the best journalists and a familiarity with drinking and smoking that old journalists understood and embraced as the necessities of their job. Nick, the central character of this book, is a private detective who undertakes a trip for his old friend, Billy, to find his missing wife. As with the best detective books, Nick is bright and good in a world of bad things. He is part of the seedy, run-down Washington D. C. scene left behind by Ronald Reagan and Dick Nixon. Little works in the town and the people that inhabit the bar which is now the primary workplace for Nick who has lost his job in "A Firing Offense," the first book of the series, are down on their luck, worn out from the rottenness of their world. It is his perseverance against this rot that makes Nick admirable and worth our time. Those whom he recruits are similarly inclined. None are perfect, all are flawed, and all show their goodness in brief moments of commitment to each other. I won't read another of Pelecanos' books for a couple of months. They make me feel drunk and filled with nicotine from the endless cigarettes and booze that the characters ingest as they hurry toward oblivion. I can wait. My world isn't as bleak, and I'm pleased that it isn't.
—Gordon
*Really, I'd give this 3.5 stars.“ 'You worry too much,' I said, but judging from the pale look on Billy's face, that bit of analysis didn't help” (32).“...and his partner was the saxman, an aging, bottom-heavy Greek I had seen around town who took his scotch through a straw” (32).“As I watched him cross the room, I felt an odd sadness, that sense of irrevocable loss one feels upon seeing a friend who has changed so drastically over so many years” (36).“ '...and shut her eyes, shut her eyes slowly and peacefully like some Disney deer'” (50)."...he oozed mindless ambition" (103)."A suburban boy on his way to a rotten liver could maybe get laid here, and if not, he could always skin his knuckles" (107)."At the National, older couples were exiting cabs, dressed and eager for Andrew Lloyd Webber's latest scam on the theatergoing public" (200). *Thank you! I can't stand that man's work.“Next to her sat another young woman with large, expensive jewelry and a tiny nose that cost more than the jewelry” (200-201)."The driver, a young man wearing a black jacket with a large eight ball embroidered across the back, stepped out and gave the world a tough glance" (231).
—Katherine
