"The tap tap tap of the blade on the glass. His dealer called that sound the mating call of the 80s." In mid-80s Washington DC, the streets are awash with cocaine, ignored by corrupt cops and capitalised upon by teenage drug gangs. For Marcus Clay and Dmitri Karras, owners of a record store deep in the ghettos and caught in the middle, something must be done. But, are good intentions worth dying for? Pelecanos effortlessly proves here that he is masterful at playing with his readers perceptions: midway through the book, two 11-year-old boys are brutally murdered by a drug lord. A reaction of anger and remorse? Not when you are confronted with the realisation that they would have ended up like their killer. In Karras, Pelecanos portrays an acute observation of slavery to cocaine, swinging from black depression to the insane frenzies of a high: "He loved to play with the stuff: sometimes he though the ritual was the best part of doing coke."The Sweet Forever finds George P Pelecanos at the peak of his game--hitting his literary target with unerring accuracy. With the exceptional detail, emotional power and precise characterisation nurtured in his prior works, the reader is inexorably drawn to the raw odyssey of an urban community teetering on the edge of total breakdown. --Danny Graydon