Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, the team of investigators who made their bestselling debut in Right As Rain, are hired to find a fourteen-year-old girl who's run away from her home in the suburbs. It's easy for Strange and Quinn to learn that the girl is now working as a prostitute in one of D.C.'s most brutal neighborhoods. Getting her to leave is harder. The two ex-cops think they know this world—but nothing in their experience has prepared them for the vengeance of Worldwide Wilson, the ruthless operator whose territory they are intruding upon.

Their mission is fractured by a violent criminal act against a young player from the neighborhood football team that Strange coaches. Tracking down the perpetrators becomes a point of honor for Strange and Quinn, and their investigation leads them deep inside the city's labyrinth of crime—and back, again, to the lethal Worldwide Wilson.

George Pelecanos's novels have earned the highest praise from crime fiction's greatest writers: "Terrific" (Elmore Leonard), "Powerful" (Michael Connelly), "The best" (Harlan Coben). This story of revenge and morality in a world with few rules makes Hell to Pay another Pelecanos masterpiece.