A Firing Offense, George P. Pelecanos 1992 novel takes readers into the trenches of free enterprise, where advertisers recycle tired appeals to suck customers into stores, where sales staffs are beaten with carrots and sticks to close deals, and where consumers arm themselves with the tiniest bits of product knowledge to defend themselves against shoddy goods and inflated prices.

Nick Stefanos is the ad manager for a small chain of Washington D.C. electronics stores where a warehouse stock-boy goes missing. The two-week absence of a low-wage metal-head doesn't excite the police into action, so the boy's grandfather appeals to the lad's coworkers for help. Stefanos is slow to take up the case, but he sees something of himself in the missing boy and is unable to resist the old man's pleas. He rationalizes this decision as an opportunity for extra income, but we soon see he's motivated as much by a desire to trade the monotony of pushing wall-to-wall sound, for a more meaningful life helping to find misplaced people.

To get away from office politics and leave time to conduct an investigation, Stefanos returns to the sales floor, where Pelecanos excels at describing the delicate but volatile balance that keeps product moving through stores. Motivation is a blend of financial incentives, supportive rivalry, self-medication and the wisdom to leave people to get on with it. Head office is more demanding than supportive. In fact, Stefanos discovers, corporate middle-management may be connected to the warehouse boy's disappearance.

To discover this, Stefanos must first take a road trip to reconnect with his landscape, his values and himself. For a less skilled writer that would be a dime-novel cliché, but Pelecanos has a well-deserved reputation for recreating D.C.'s environs in print. Though a lot of A Firing Offense takes place in generic suburbs, Pelecanos' skill flashes when Stefanos visits an uncle in the Greek neighbourhood where he grew up, and is told, "When I first come here, your papou and me swam in the Potomac on hot summer afternoons. Now it's so dirty, I wouldn't even throw a photograph of myself into that river."

The style remains tight and credible up to the end, when the crime story is weakened by the introduction of new characters and an over-long denouement. But along the way Stefanos, who becomes a recurring series character in some of Pelecanos crime novels, finds a fault in the transcendence of capitalism, a system where people serve the economy, rather than the other way around.