Another trip around the dark corners of the other Washington, D.C. (the one that has little to do with the workings of the government), the latest from George Pelecanos picks up almost exactly where last year's Right As Rain left off. The author's admirers wouldn't have it any other way. The second in a series featuring private investigator Derek Strange and his short-tempered, disgraced-cop sidekick Terry Quinn, Hell To Pay again proves Pelecanos' talent for presenting the horrors of everyday crime through the eyes of characters who aren't easily shocked, and allowing those characters to reveal themselves across many pages and several books. Sex and its consequences provide the overriding theme, as Strange and Quinn's search for an underage prostitute leads them deep into different branches of the D.C. underworld. As Quinn develops a personal grudge against a brutal pimp, Strange looks into the death of a fatherless child killed in a drug shooting. In time, they begin to identify with their own investigations: Quinn sees his own capacity for violence in his quarry, while the philandering Strange recognizes his culpability when speaking with the abandoned women of D.C.'s troubled neighborhoods. In their earnest concern for the social ills around them, Pelecanos' characters sometimes sound like Sunday-morning talk-show panelists, stopping short only of spouting statistics. To the author's credit, even these lapses seem organic to the story and its characters: men whose difficulty expressing themselves finds a welcome outlet in the anger stirred by the cold, hard facts of crime. Like Pelecanos' previous books, Hell To Pay makes its protagonists, and the inner struggles they only partly understand, gripping enough that the tautly plotted, vividly realized crime story could almost work as an afterthought.