About 20 years ago, the book collector’s magazine “First” published an impressive article on George Pelecanos, a new writer that was not only imminently collectable, but was (in their opinion) destined to “change the face of crime fiction.” That was the start of my admiration for Pelecanos. Quite honestly, I found the novels consistently brilliant, especially his early works like A Firing Offense, Shoedog and Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go.

Many successful writers prefer to set their novels in their “signature” location: T. Jefferson Parker frequently uses Orange County, Calif.; James Lee Burke loves Louisiana; Many of Dennis Lehane’s characters are at home on the back streets of Boston; and Carl Hiassen (like the late Charles Williford) prefers Miami.

Pelecanos’ turf is Washington, D.C., and his characters move, fight, love and murder each other in the labyrinthine streets of the capital city. In fact, reading a Pelecanos novel is like taking a tour of D.C.’s nightclubs and restaurants while Spero Lucas does a running commentary on the city’s polyglot cuisine, music and crime as he rides his bicycle from Dupont Circle down Georgia Avenue.

However, Spero is a unique creation. Home from Iraq with a lot of bad memories, he quickly becomes a successful cop, but he has what could be described as an unstable “moral compass.” He frequently finds that he has little patience with a spectrum of petty crimes — marijuana (Spero smokes pot himself) and prostitution seem irrelevant in a city filled with violence and mayhem. Due to his training, Spero can kill with speed and efficiency.  In addition, he is never troubled with guilt or misgivings since he only kills people who are intent on killing him.

Oddly enough, Spero is a devoted son who spends generous amounts of time with his Greek family, especially his brother Le, who is a school teacher. Still distraught over his father’s death, he makes frequent trips to the cemetery to deliver flowers. There is also a host of relatives and neighbors that are a vital part of Spero’s life -— relationships that this hardened cop values.

When the narrative of The Cut moves abruptly from Spero, the mindful son who engages in affectionate repartee with his brother, to Spero, the unemotional killer (his hands are truly lethal weapons and his ability to utilize fire arms is awesome), the transition is unnerving. Perhaps what is most troubling is Spero does not hesitate to violate the very laws he has sworn to enforce ... if the need arises.

Consider the significance of the title. The Cut refers to Spero’s portion of an illegal activity. Spero agrees to enter into an agreement with Anwan Hawkins, a known trafficker of marijuana, who has developed an inventive way to transport his product: He simply mails it by FedEx to an address where he knows the resident will not be home. Then, the party purchasing the marijuana arrives with a van and hauls the delivery away ... usually within minutes of delivery. The resident never knows that his address has been used. A problem arises when “someone” arrives and picks up the package (worth about $130,000) and drives away. Anwan asks Spero to find out who is stealing his pot. Spero readily agrees since he has no moral qualms about trafficking in marijuana anyway.  His “cut” will be 30 percent of the marijuana’s value ($50,000).

Why does Spero do it? That is a good question and I’m not sure Pelecanos provides us with an answer. Perhaps it is his expensive lifestyle, since he is part of what appears to be a kind of D. C. “cult” about dress: Spero wears Carhartt clothing and Wolverine boots. Every item (shirts, watches, automobiles) is selected for the prestige of the brand name. Spero loves good food and music. Many of the juveniles that Spero encounters conform to the same “cult” — some even wearing clothing with highly visible price tags and brand names. Tastes in music and sports are regulated in the same manner.

However, the problem in The Cut is more serious than FedEx pot and clothing styles. Two amiable young men, Tavon Lynch and Avon Davis, have the highly profitable job of picking up the FedEx packages for Anwan Hawkins and allegedly find that someone had beat them to it.

When Tavon and Avon are murdered, Spero suddenly finds that he is no longer a part of a questionable activity involving stolen pot. The stakes are suddenly much higher, and Spero’s investigation brings him into conflict with a crime figure (who is a former policeman) known as Rooster Holley, a repugnant man who has surrounded himself with a half-dozen assassins. When the situation escalates, Spero intuitively knows that not only is his life at risk, but also the lives of his family and even his neighbors. His warfare background tells him that not only must he strike first, but that his enemies must be totally eradicated.

In many ways, The Cut is a disturbing book — not because of the violence and brutality depicted, but because of “the message.” Spero can dispatch a would-be assassin with his hands. He can acquire illegal firearms (with serial numbers removed), slaughter a half dozen vicious criminals, and then throw all of the guns into a river ... just like a criminal would do. If need be, he calls “friends” to assist him — men who bear the scars of warfare, but will guard Spero’s back in the same manner that they would have do so in Iraq or Vietnam. Spero is subject to “urges” ... a compulsive need to complete grueling physical exercise (a 25-mile bike trip), to have sex, or to confront a force that threatens his family. There are times when his behavior resembles that of a predator rather than an investigator. He knows how to move quietly in the dark.

To me, the problem is the uncertain wavering of Spero’s “moral compass.” Is it possible that our most effective defenders — those who stand between us and chaos — are men who are very similar to those who threaten us? I am reminded of James Elroy’s novels that often conclude by revealing that the only difference between the cops and the criminals are the uniforms. Should our anxiety be relieved by the fact that Spero is not a total brute? He is capable of love, compassion and loyalty. He is, undeniably on our side. Is that enough? Should we admire him?

The Cut by George Pelecanos. Little, Brown & Company, 2011. 292 pages

(Gary Carden is a writer and storyteller who lives in Sylva. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Although Americans are known for their wandering ways, traveling to California in Conestoga wagons, taking the train to find a place in Broadway’s spotlight, many also retain in their hearts a deep affection for a particular place. Whether that place is a Chicago parish or Mayberry RFD is immaterial. It is this beloved place to which we compare all the other cities and landscapes of our lives, this place which haunts, for better or worse, our memories, this place whose very name is a tsunami, a massive wave swamping us in a thousand names, faces, and events from a past as much imagined as it is real.

Boonville in the Yadkin Valley of Piedmont, North Carolina is my place. Though I only lived in that small town of 600 souls for less than eight years (by comparison I have lived four times as long in these mountains), it is the Boonville of my childhood which haunts my memories, which irrevocably stamped my personality. Say the word home, and the word Boonville floats up in my mind like one of those eight-ball answers.

Allen Paul Speer’s From Banner Elk to Boonville: The Voices Trilogy: Part III (Overmountain Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-57072-329-2, $14.95) recreates the beauty and the enchantment of Boonville and the Yadkin Valley for the general reader (A caveat and a confession: Allen Speer was my friend during my Boonville adolescence, and remains a dear friend today). Comparing favorably Boonville and its environs to Tolkien’s Shire, Speer writes that “here are some of the words that best describe Yadkinians: practical, helpful, God-fearing, industrious, static, suspicious, confident, and reluctant to stir things up.”

By virtue of example rather than by such definitions, Speer also makes it clear that Yadkinians — a word of Speer’s creation, I suspect — also love storytelling. From Banner Elk to Boonville as well as the earlier two books in this trilogy — Voices From Cemetery Hill, which tells the story of Boonville’s Civil War era, and Sisters of Providence, which also tells that story from the viewpoint of the well-educated Speer women — revel in telling stories. There, for example, is the tale of the Halloween prank when a tractor was mysteriously gotten into the lobby of Boonville school (I was there, and saw it, and to this day marvel at the high school boys who pulled this one off); the stories of various Speer ancestors and townspeople; the coming of the Stammettis, owners of the Astoria Braid Mill who considerably livened up Boonville’s party life; the antics of people with nicknames like Nut, Roach, Marron, and Mouse.

Not all of From Banner Elk to Boonville is sunshine and roses. Speer shares the details of his battle against leukemia, a slow-acting lupus which he has fought for many years now. He also shows us the effect of the deaths of his grandfather and father on his spiritual and mental life. As a boy, he shared a room with his grandfather for several years, and found that after his grandfather’s death, he could no longer sleep in that room. His father, too, he deeply loved, in spite of Red’s fierce temper, and once again that death shattered him, casting him into a deep melancholy from which he took years to recover.

After college, unable to find work, Speer returned to Boonville, earned a little money painting houses, and eventually suffered a mental breakdown. His description of this psychotic episode, which he calls his “meltdown,” lies in some ways at the heart of the book as a defining, perhaps the defining, moment in Speer’s life. His crackup culminated in his attempt to walk from Boonville to Boone, some 60 miles away. He ended his journey only a few miles outside of Boonville, collapsed in a farmer’s yard. Here is a brief but harrowing account of a soul at odds with itself, and of a young man lost even in a place which had always afforded him comfort and respite.

One fine feature of this autobiography is Speer’s sense of humor, his eye for the ridiculous, the absurd, the offbeat, the unconventional. Here, for example, in telling us where he got his love for the theater, he describes a conversation he had with his Aunt Mary about her brother, Speer’s grandfather, whom Speer called Papa:

“’Did you say Papa never finished high school?’

‘No, when he stopped high school, he was still taking freshman English, but he kept on going to school so he could play baseball and be in school plays, and he was in every play they had.’

‘How many years did he go to high school?’

‘Six years.’

‘He went to high school for six years?’

“Yes, he just kept on going ‘til they encouraged him to stop.’”

Speer has organized From Banner Elk to Boonville in chapters named after the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. Given Speer’s Quaker, Presbyterian, and Baptist roots, this device seems at first ill-fitted to the narrative and may even seem strained to some readers. Those who read carefully, however, soon see that Speer is recounting here the spiritual journey of a lifetime. He offers numerous reflections on God and mortality, and uses stories and dreams to consider both the nature of God and the place of God in his own life. Readers will be delighted to find that in these ruminations, Speer’s sense of humor does not desert him.

Allen Speer, a professor at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, has given readers a grand treat of a book — an affectionate and loving memoir of a place, a time, a man, and his people.

From Banner Elk to Boonville: The Voices Trilogy: Part III by Paul Speer. Overmountain Press, 2010.

God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America by Hanna Rosin. Harcourt, 2007. 304 pages

Every once in a while a book sees print that inadvertently tells the unwashed what the elite thinks of them. Massa waltzes out of the Big House —Washington, Manhattan, Beverly Hills — rubs elbows with the field hands, and then retreats to the Big House to write the other massas about conditions on the plantation. Sometimes Massa morphs into an amateur anthropologist, breathlessly explaining to fellow denizens of the West Side or Georgetown the mores of the poor dumb savages she has encountered in the foreign wastelands of Tennessee, Kansas, and Wyoming.

Chemistry and Other Stories by Ron Rash. Picador, 2007. 230 pages

This remarkable collection of short stories has already been named one of the 15 “notable books” of 2007 by the Story Prize Committee — an award that is presented annually in recognition of the nation’s best. The top award, $20,000, is the largest literary prize in America. In announcing their selection, the contest officials stated “The Appalachian Mountains are the setting of this beautifully crafted collection that begins and ends with a fish and spans several generations in an isolated region with characters as craggy as the landscape.”

How To Make A Journal Of Your Life by D. Price. Ten Speed Press, $9.95.

Ant Farm by Simon Rich. Random House, $12.95.

Many people have attempted at least once in their lives to keep a journal. Whether they use one of those expensive, leather-bound journals with creamy white paper from their local bookstore or simply a cheap notebook from Wal-Mart, they set out to chronicle their lives for their own pleasure and perhaps for the edification of their offspring.

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen. Doubleday, 2007. $22.95

Web 2.0 is killing our culture.

Evolution In A Nutshell by Martin Malloy. Trafford Publishing, 2007. 302 pages

Evolution is one of those wonderfully fiery topics which, when broached at parties or family gatherings, can convert otherwise reasonable friends and relatives into raging maniacs, shouting, slamming their fists onto the table, and crunching beer cans against their heads (somewhat like chimpanzees signaling irritation or fear).

The Machiavelli Covenant by Allan Folsom. Forge Books,2006. 560 pages

The last 20 years have seen the creation of a special niche within the genre of ÒSuspense NovelsÓ as more and more books have appeared featuring a tiny group of protagonists facing great odds as they uncover some secret from the past.

The Encyclopedia of Appalachia.  University of Tennessee Press, 2007. 1864 pages

Sometimes good things come in big packages.

And the Encyclopedia of Appalachia is big. More than 1,800 pages of finely-printed prose make up this boxlike book. I’m not sure exactly what the Encyclopedia weighs, but if you dropped it on someone’s foot you might face arrest for assault with a deadly weapon.

Letters to My Son on the Love of Books by Roberto Coltroneo. Ecco Press, 1998. 151 pages.

In the Dec. 24 issue of The New Yorker, Caleb Crain addresses the decline of literacy and the increasing disinterest in reading in “Twilight of the Books: what will life be like if people stop reading?” Despite the title, Crain doesn’t speculate much about the future of reading, though he does offer the comment that if we continue our swing away from printed knowledge toward audiovisual imagery — television, movies, YouTube — ”the nation’s conversation with itself is likely to change.”