George Pelecanos

If you’re a fan of The Wire, George Pelecanos needs no introduction. If you’re not, the knowledge that Stephen King has dubbed him ‘America’s greatest living crime writer’, or that his most recent novel, The Way Home, was chosen by President Obama for his holiday reading last summer, or that he is also the most-borrowed author in the Washington DC prison should help to put you in the picture.

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One of the key scriptwriters on what has been described as ‘the best TV series ever made’, The Wire, he has fifteen novels to his name since his first was published in 1992, most of which chronicle the racial tensions and social injustices on the mean streets of his hometown, Washington DC.

Born in Washington, D.C. in 1957, George Pelecanos, as he lists on his website, worked as a line cook, dishwasher, bartender, and woman's shoe salesman before publishing his first novel in 1992.

He is the award-winning author of fifteen crime novels set in and around the mean streets of Washington, D.C.: A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, Shoedog, Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go, The Big Blowdown, King Suckerman, The Sweet Forever, Shame the Devil, Right as Rain, Hell to Pay, Soul Circus, Hard Revolution, Drama City, The Night Gardener, and The Turnaround. He has been the recipient of the Raymond Chandler award in Italy, the Falcon award in Japan, and the Grand Prix Du Roman Noir in France. Hell to Pay and Soul Circus were awarded the 2003 and 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. His short fiction has appeared in Esquire magazine (which also referred to him as "the poet laureate of the D.C. crime world")and the collections Unusual Suspects, Best American Mystery Stories of 1997, Measures of Poison, Best American Mystery Stories of 2002, Men From Boys, Murder at the Foul Line, and D.C. Noir, for which he also served as editor. He is an award-winning essayist who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Sight and Sound, Uncut, Mojo and numerous other publications.

Pelecanos served as producer on the feature films Caught, Whatever and BlackMale, and was the U.S. distributor of John Woo's cult classic, The Killer and Richard Bugajski's Interrogation. Most recently, he was a producer, writer, and story editor for the acclaimed HBO dramatic series, The Wire, for which he was nominated for an Emmy award. He was also a writer on the World War II mini-series The Pacific, produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.

He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife and three children, and has recently published his latest novel The Way Home.

The Way Home
Hidden beneath the floorboards in a house he's remodelling, Christopher Flynn discovers something very tempting-and troubling. Summoning every bit of maturity and every lesson he's learned the hard way, Chris leaves what he found where he found it and tells his job partner to forget it, too. Knowing trouble when he sees it-and walking the other way-is a habit Chris is still learning. Chris's father, Thomas Flynn, runs the family business where Chris and his friends have found work. Thomas is just getting comfortable with the idea that his son is grown, working, and on the right path at last. Then one day Chris doesn't show up for work-and his father knows deep in his bones that danger has found him. Although he wishes it weren't so, he also knows that no parent can protect a child from all the world's evils. Sometimes you have to let them find their own way home.

Read more about The Way Home, including a free downloadable extract, at Lovereading.co.uk