THRILLERS From Pizza to PaternityMaureen Corrigan. Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University and is the book critic for NPR's "Fresh Air." SHAME THE DEVIL, by George P. Pelecanos. Little, Brown, 299 pp., $24.95. CHAOS THEORY, by Gary Krist. Random House, 347 pp., $24. AFTERBURN, by Colin Harrison. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 438 pp., $25. THE ATTORNEY, by Steve Martini. Putnam, 429 pp., $25.95. FROM THAT ultimate Cold War white-knuckle novel, 1962's "Fail-Safe," to the current prime-time political soap "The West Wing," the subgenre of the Washington thriller has defined itself through certain stock images and plot ploys, among them: a rainy nighttime scene in which the Capitol/ White House / Washington Monument is shrouded in ominous mist; another nighttime episode involving an anxious, pajama-clad president talking on "the red phone" to a trusted adviser/ belligerent foreign potentate in an eleventh-hour attempt to head off nuclear disaster/extraterrestrial invasion/ total annihilation of New York City. (It's always New York in the Washington thriller; Los Angeles takes the lead in environmental disaster yarns.) And, finally, there's the subplot involving the president's daughter/wife/mistress, whose life is risked/lost in order to ensure the continued well-being of the galaxy/New York City. Those of us who live in Washington, D.C., however, know that another city coexists alongside the cosmopolitan capital. This other Washington is a tumble-down town whose history of corruption, underfunded municipal services, stark racial divides and greasy palms provides the material out of which smaller-scale urban suspense stories are made. Not surprisingly, two sharp-eyed thriller writers have spotted the city's seedy literary potential. "Shame the Devil" by George Pelecanos and "Chaos Theory" by Gary Krist take place on the streets of a Washington, D.C., that only its residents know and fear. Call them Way-Inside-the-Beltway Washington thrillers. For a D.C. resident, reading George Pelecanos is a little like listening to the local news. He captures not only the city's characteristic mishaps, but also its tone-the hollowness of a Sunday afternoon in February that pervades Washington's suburbs and slums. It's the empty feeling of a city where no one is really in charge. "Shame the Devil" is Pelecano's eighth novel set in Washington, and it's a winner - harrowing, fast-paced and packed with vividly drawn potential victims and criminals. The crime that sets the story in motion is bungled - appropriately enough for a city where lots of things don't work. In the summer of 1995, a vicious ex-con named Frank Farrow and his partner, Roman Otis (who has a penchant for singing rhythm and blues as he works), hold up a pizza parlor in well-heeled Northwest Washington. Farrow and Otis have learned from an inside source that the owner of the joint is taking in more than orders for pepperoni pizzas: He's running an illegal betting operation, and the two thugs want to make off with the loot. But when the owner pulls a gun on them, the pair shoot him dead and then execute all the employees. Meanwhile, outside the shop, a D.C. cop spots the getaway car and, in the gun battle that ensues, kills the driver, Farrow's younger brother. Farrow and Otis escape, but Farrow vows revenge. Fast-forward to 1998. Ever since what the papers dubbed "The Pizza Parlor Murders" took place, relatives of the slain employees have been meeting, weekly, in an informal support group. When Farrow decides it's time to emerge from hibernation to hunt down that cop, the safety of the group (some of whom know too much) is also jeopardized. Sure, the plot of "Shame the Devil" is contrived, but you hardly notice, because Pelecanos is such a terrific writer. His main characters, particularly his anti-hero, a small-time private investigator named Nick Stefanos, are so compelling and pockmarked by moral failings that you don't just feel like you know them, you feel like you were them in some other life. Minor figures are rendered memorable in a few assured strokes. For instance, describing a police detective who's knocking back an afternoon at a bar, Pelecanos writes: "There were certain kinds of drinkers who had a sleepy kind of cruelty in their eyes." As for suspense, well, reading "Shame the Devil" is a great yoga exercise: You inhale on page one and don't fully exhale until the penultimate chapter. In between, there are murders, double-crosses and one of the most restrained yet sadistic sex scenes I've ever read, involving nothing kinky, just a very loose thumbnail. "Chaos Theory" is also a winner-a bit less hard-boiled perhaps, but no less grim in its estimation of Washington. Like "Shame the Devil," it's situated primarily in Northwest D.C. (the city's most affluent and whitest quadrant), as if to imply that the lawyers and other symbol analysts who live there shouldn't feel too smug about their locks and electronic burglar alarms. On a daredevil impulse, two Northwest D.C. high school students, Dennis Monroe, who's black, and his friend Jason Rourke, who's white, go for a drive one night into the city's netherworld to buy a few joints. When the street dealer pulls a pistol on them, the boys peel away, dragging the dealer with them and slamming him into a parked car and, they assume, killing him. Matters get worse when the next day they learn that the dealer was a (rotten) undercover cop -except the dead cop's picture in the paper doesn't match up with their memories. Aided by their sexy and hard-nosed high school journalism teacher, Dennis and Jason gradually realize they've stumbled into the thick of an evil identity-swapping scheme run by some of D.C.'s own municipal agencies, including the police department. "Chaos Theory" stirs up real terror, particularly because we see much of the action through the eyes of teenagers, for whom the world feels out of control even on a good day. As in "Shame the Devil," characters as well as locales in and around D.C. are vividly drawn. "Chaos is just another word for opportunity," one of the bad guys says cheekily, explaining to Dennis why Washington is such a fertile city for corruption. Given that Washington is also such a segregated city, it's striking that both Pelecanos and Krist populate their superb thrillers with an integrated cast. It's as if in the midst of all this depravity and violence, both novelists also wanted to give their readers a utopian vision of transformed race relations in the nation's capital. Colin Harrison is getting on my nerves. Maybe it's largely his publicist's fault, but Harrison's suspense novels, and particularly his latest one, "Afterburn," are touted as rare birds, because they are "literary thrillers" - as though no one, not Graham Greene or John le Carr or Robert Ludlum or Patricia Highsmith, had ever attempted such an astonishing fictional gene splicing before. But what's really irritating is that in this case "literary" seems to mean that we're treated to a series of tiresomely elaborate internal monologues in which we learn little of interest about the characters except that their sentence structure is wordy. The copious sex scenes are also pretty wordy without being particularly erotic: "When the moment came he pressed his hot forehead heavily down upon hers, and delivered himself fully into her-the bomb, the hatred, the roar; the joy, the sadness, the dream." And the copious violence is revolting, but somehow too clinical to be engrossing: There's a prolonged amputation scene here, for instance, that doesn't come anywhere near the suspense generated by that flapping thumbnail in "Shame the Devil." The plot of "Afterburn" revolves around the attempts of Charlie Ravich, once a Vietnam War POW and now a self-made millionaire, to father a child. (His middle-aged daughter is infertile and Charlie is obsessed with genetic legacy, so adoption is out.) Charlie advertises for a rent-a-womb, but, meanwhile, he meets the alluring Christina Welles, an ex-con on the lam from the mob boss she ripped off. Charlie and Christina have an affair of sorts, while subplots spawn subplots and wiseguys with drills and surgical saws run amok in Manhattan-all described in great literary detail. Perhaps thankfully, Steve Martini's "The Attorney" doesn't aspire to be anything more than a meat-and-potatoes legal thriller, and in its modest way it's very entertaining. Martini's recurring hero, defense attorney and amateur detective Paul Madriani, has moved to San Diego, where he's hired by a former client whose granddaughter has been kidnaped by a woman named Zolanda Suade. Suade is your cardboard rabid feminist man-hater; she's also the director of an organization called the Women's Defense Forum, which specializes in removing kids from the oppressive clutches of the patriarchy. When Suade is found murdered, Madriani's client becomes the prime suspect. The case is complicated by death threats from an irate drug kingpin and by the fact that Madriani's steady girlfriend heads a child welfare agency that was also targeted by Suade. Not only is the end of "The Attorney" satisfying and genuinely shocking, it's awfully sad, too. |