{"id":1164,"date":"2011-09-16T23:16:06","date_gmt":"2011-09-17T03:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/?p=1164"},"modified":"2013-04-26T16:37:25","modified_gmt":"2013-04-26T20:37:25","slug":"book-review-the-cut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/2011\/09\/book-review-the-cut.html","title":{"rendered":"Book Review : The Cut"},"content":{"rendered":"

[amazon_link id=”0316078425″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]\"The[\/amazon_link]Author : George Pelecanos
\nGenre : Mystery\/Crime\/Thriller
\nPublisher : Little, Brown and Company
\nRating : 3\/5
\nSource : NetGalley Publisher ARC<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Cut\u201d is a police procedural style novel, in which it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s underlings and scouts out the land. The underlings soon die, and things go downhill from there.<\/p>\n

This time I\u2019ve gone and wandered into a book which looks like it\u2019s written solely for an all male audience. Testosterone heavy, the book has as it\u2019s 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 \u201cshe was dark-haired, fully curved and effortlessly attractive\u201d, and in the book solely to serve as Lucas\u2019s sexual conquests.<\/p>\n

As a PI novel, this book is interesting, but nothing out of the ordinary. Pelecanos\u2019s 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 \u2013 step after step after step, all of which is described in great detail.<\/p>\n

Pelecanos also has a thing for describing clothes, music, food and eating places in great detail. He may not tell you what color Lucas\u2019s skin is \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got to say that this book didn\u2019t work for me, primarily because I didn\u2019t 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 \u2013 the penchant to wear your masculinity on your sleeve. I also had trouble with the deprecatory tone towards females in the book.<\/p>\n

Readers of the genre and Pelecanos fans will probably like this one. The rest : please proceed with caution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[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 \u201cThe Cut\u201d is a police procedural style novel, in which it\u2019s Iraqi war vet protagonist Spero Lucas does investigative work for a price; his finding fee is 40%. Lucas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"twitter_17000648_17000648":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[49,72,53,3,58,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-49","category-3_star_rating","category-arc","category-books","category-crime","category-little_brown"],"aioseo_notices":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"post-thumbnail":false,"sow-carousel-default":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"amodini","author_link":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/author\/admin"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"[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 \u201cThe Cut\u201d is a police procedural style novel, in which it\u2019s Iraqi war vet protagonist Spero Lucas does investigative work for a price; his finding fee is 40%. Lucas…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1164"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2619,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164\/revisions\/2619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}