Shame the Devil was published by Little, Brown in 2000 and concludes the D.C. Quartet. A robbery at a pizza restaurant goes catastrophically wrong, leaving several people dead — employees, customers, bystanders. Three years later, the surviving robber, Frank Farrow, returns to D.C. to kill the witnesses who can identify him. Dimitri Karras, one of those witnesses, must confront Farrow while also confronting his own addictions and failures.
The novel brought the Quartet’s themes to their darkest conclusion: the accumulated violence of the previous three books (spanning the 1940s through the 1980s) crashes into the present, and the characters must reckon with what the city has done to them and what they have done to the city.
Collecting Shame the Devil
First edition (Little, Brown, New York, 2000): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- Fine in dust jacket: $30–$75
- Very good: $10–$30
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate to strong appreciation. The conclusion of the D.C. Quartet is considered essential Pelecanos.
The Quartet’s Conclusion
Shame the Devil is the darkest and most violent of the Quartet novels, bringing the multi-generational saga to a brutal conclusion. The restaurant massacre that opens the story resonates with real incidents of random American violence, and the returning killer’s quest for revenge creates a conventional thriller structure that Pelecanos subverts by focusing on the survivors’ damaged interior lives rather than the mechanics of pursuit.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the D.C. Quartet Pelecanos’s best work? Many critics consider it his masterwork — a single sustained narrative of Washington D.C. from the Depression to the 1990s, told through interconnected families and communities. The four novels together constitute one of the most ambitious social-historical projects in American crime fiction.