Lorenzo Brown loves his work. As an officer for the Humane Society, it is his job to cruise the city streets, looking for dogs that are being mistreated - underfed, unclean, trained to kill. He takes pride in making their lives better. And that pride helps Lorenzo resist the pull of easier money doing the kind of work that got him a recent prison bid. Rachel Lopez loves her work, too. By day she is a parole officer, helping people- Lorenzo Brown among them - along a path back to responsibility and advancement. At night she heads for the city's hotel bars, where she can always find a man who will let her act out her damage. She loses herself in sex and drink and more.

Writing with the grace and force that have earned him praise as "the poet laureate of the crime world," George Pelecanos has created a novel about two scarred and human people who must navigate one of life's most brutal passages. It is an unforgettable, moving, even shocking story that will leave no reader...