-- Michael Harris

*Soul Circus

A Novel

George P. Pelecanos

Little, Brown: 352 pp., $24.95

"Soul Circus" serves up what George Pelecanos' fans have come to expect and, once again, the effect is sharp and satisfying: a richly textured tapestry, a quirky plot, a large, multicolored cast of lawbreakers, law enforcers, misfits, malfeasants and innocent bystanders. The venue, as always, is Washington, D.C., and alentours. Derek Strange, P.I., works for a local law firm. Through neighborhoods where crickets chirp on summer nights but where you're more likely to get yourself capped than in others, he pursues witnesses for the trial of a gang lord, hoping for evidence that would spare the client's life. Strange's stamping ground teems with gangs and gun dealers who sell cheap guns to project kids and better pieces to more advanced entrepreneurs.

Strange lays his life on the line for a living but also because he wants to save the world or, at least, a few of the kids with no fathers, no education and no exit except prison or death. He succeeds (modestly) because he's unrelentingly professional, honorable and decent. Witnesses and associates die, and so do the criminals, mostly by mutual massacre. But Strange's family thrives and he survives to empathize another day. The novels of Pelecanos are passionate, vital and vigorously demotic. If they have sense, historians to come will plumb them for evidence of how men and women lived, feared and coped in the war zones of everyday life: not only when they preyed on each other but when they talked, loved, listened to music or just wasted time.

-- Eugen Weber

*Southland

A Novel

Nina Revoyr

Akashic Books: 352 pp., $15.95 paper

The plot of "Southland" by Nina Revoyr is distinctly noir, but the point of view is surprisingly rosy. Essentially, the novel is a murder mystery: The young heroine, Jackie Ishida, embarks upon a quest to find out whether her beloved grandfather once bloodied his hands in a multiple homicide. Along the way, however, Jackie rediscovers a time and place in the recent history of Los Angeles that the author conjures up as nothing less than a paradise.

The setting of "Southland" is a neighborhood once called Angeles Mesa and now known as the Crenshaw District. According to Revoyr, the Mesa was once a place of racial diversity and ethnic harmony, a garden spot where palm trees and orange trees grew side by side. "Hopeful newlyweds, coughing factory workers, old sharecroppers with hands hardened by years of labor, all bit into the sweet juicy oranges and thought they tasted heaven," she writes.