DOWN BY THE RIVER WHERE THE DEAD MEN GO: GEORGE PELECANOS ***

This is the third and final Pelecanos book that follows Nick Stefanos on his journey through vigilantism and alcoholism, an interesting combination of character traits.  In this story, Nick goes on a bender, wakes up in the mud, next to a river and overhears two guys shooting a young black kid.  He knows nothing more about them than that but he becomes obsessed with finding out who they are, why they did it. Again, like his other novels, Nick bar hops and drinks throughout the story, eventually costing him a relationship with his current girl friend, Lyla.  In between his working at The Spot, he begins to talk with people who knew the boy, especially his mother and the mother of the boy's best friend. Neither are helpful but a new character enters the story, Jack La Duke, hired by one of the mother's to find her son who is missing.  Jack is a straight shooter, non drinker and smoker, the perfect foil for Nick.  Together, they begin to gather information about the two kids.  Both were involved in drugs, to a certain extent in prostitution and the porn industry, complicating things.  It seems clear they were both shot because they knew too much.  Nick and friend track down the suspects, and Nick ends up getting beaten up and almost shot before LeDuke comes to the rescue, guns down two guys holding Nick, and seems to go out in a blaze of glory, setting the building on fire, him along with it.  Nick is still dissatisfied, does some more searching and finds the guy at the top, a real estate/drug dealer named Samuels.  He picks him up, drives to the river, and shoots him in the head, dumping his body in the water, which is fast becoming his modus operandi...doing things on his own without the cops.  At the end, Boyle, his cop friend from the previous book, stops by and basically tells Nick that he knows he shot Samuels but admits to doing the same sort of thing when he cornered a serial rapist a few years ago.  Thus, he lets Nick go, to live another day, perhaps appear in another novel.