Nick Stefanos Books in Order

The Nick Stefanos novels are written in the cracked, funny, and often despairing first person voice of a man who cannot quite get out of his own way. Nick is a Greek American Washingtonian who loves loud music, cheap drinks, and late nights, and who keeps drifting from advertising jobs into trouble.

In A Firing Offense he is a marketing manager for a discount electronics chain, spending as much time drinking with sales staff as he does pushing stereos. When a teenage stock clerk disappears, Nick is guilt tripped into looking for him and stumbles into a small scale drug operation that shows him just how thin the line is between the sales floor and the street.

By Nick's Trip he has been fired, is tending bar at a dive called The Spot, and has picked up a private investigator's license. An old high school buddy asks him to find his missing wife, a favor that leads to a road trip, a murder, and encounters with the local mob. Nick does the work, but his heavy drinking and half formed plans make every step feel precarious.

In Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go things get darker. Nick, now a full time bartender and part time drunk, wakes from a binge by the Anacostia River and realizes he has overheard a killing. Deciding he cannot ignore it, he teams up with a straight laced investigator and goes looking for the men responsible, walking into a world of exploited teens, pornography, and small time gangsters.

Across the trilogy, the cases matter, but the real story is Nick's slow slide from sarcastic slacker to someone who has seen too much. The books are packed with references to bands, old bars, and forgotten corners of DC, and they treat work in sales, service, and nightlife as seriously as any police job.

Expect coarse language, black humor, and a narrator who is quick to point out his own failures. These novels show the city from the perspective of someone who pours drinks for cops, dealers, and lawyers alike, making Nick a kind of tour guide to Washington's working class and its lost souls.