Nick’s Trip was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1993. Nick Stefanos has left the electronics store and is tending bar at the Spot, a neighborhood dive. Billy Goodrich, an old friend from Stefanos’s youth, walks in and asks him to find his missing wife, April. The search takes Stefanos through the sex industry that once lined 14th Street NW — the strip clubs, the adult bookstores, the massage parlors — and into a world where women disappear regularly and nobody asks questions.
The novel deepened Pelecanos’s engagement with D.C. geography and class. Where the first book focused on the drug trade, this one mapped the exploitative economy of the sex industry, placing it within the specific physical landscape of 14th Street before gentrification transformed the corridor into boutiques and condominiums.
Collecting Nick’s Trip
First edition (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1993): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- Fine in dust jacket: $100–$250
- Very good: $40–$100
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. Early Pelecanos first editions are increasingly scarce.
The 14th Street Corridor
In the early 1990s, 14th Street NW was D.C.’s red-light district — strip clubs, adult bookstores, and open prostitution. Pelecanos uses this landscape not as noir set-dressing but as the economic reality of a neighbourhood abandoned by civic investment. Nick’s search for a friend’s missing wife through this world is simultaneously a detective story and a documentary of a D.C. that would vanish within a decade as gentrification transformed the corridor into one of the city’s trendiest neighbourhoods.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Nick Stefanos reading order? A Firing Offense (1992), Nick’s Trip (1993), Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go (1995). The trilogy follows Stefanos from electronics salesman to bartender to private investigator as his drinking worsens and his engagement with D.C.’s street life deepens.