A collection of stories, mostly gritty, low-level crime stories set on Washington DC’s mean streets. The Martini Shot itself is set in the world of TV, featuring a scriptwriter on a popular cop show. When a member of the crew is murdered, the screenwriter decides to track down the perpetrators himself, to see if, as a writer, he can do more than just talk the talk.

‘George Pelecanos is a stunningly good chronicler of the mean streets of Washington DC … For anyone who has somehow missed out on Pelecanos, he is up there with Elmore Leonard and even Chandler for street dialogue and inner city settings, and there is always a pleasing moral undertow to his work’ Daily Mail on The Night Gardener