On Rereading

My guest today is Tom Milani. He's been generously filling in for me while I've juggled several deadlines. I always enjoy his thoughtful pieces, much like his today on rereading. He has me reflecting on the books I return to and why. I suspect you will, too. Here's more from Tom.

On Rereading

by Tom Milani

I like to reread books from certain authors. Knowing the plot and characters allows me to focus on things 

I may have missed the first time through, and I get something new each time I reread. There’s also comfort in the familiar. As I told another writer, it’s like watching a favorite movie (e.g., Collateral) a second or third time: it never disappoints.

Here I want to talk about two of the authors I regularly reread, what attracts me to their writing, and what I think they do particularly well.

George Pelecanos

For any crime writers in the DC metropolitan area, George Pelecanos needs no introduction. Author of over twenty novels, screenwriter on numerous shows (most famously The Wire), he’s firmly established in the crime fiction community. Pelecanos writes about the working class, people living in neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park and often east of the Anacostia River, markers of economic and racial divides. He also peppers his books with local music references and venues, which adds a bit of nostalgia for anyone who grew up in the area. For me, his principal themes are what being a man means and the value of blue-collar work and public service. He does all this while telling fast-paced, compelling stories.

Several of his novels have recurring characters—Derek Strange, Dimitri Karras, Marcus Clay—so reading those books is like being among friends, or at least people you know well. One of my favorites of Pelecanos’s books is probably one of his lesser-known works. A Firing Offence and Nick’s Trip, his first two novels, are first-person PI stories featuring Nick Stefanos. Shoedog, his third novel, is a multiple-POV standalone. Then came Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, his last first-person PI novel (though not his last PI novel). For me, it’s his best title and also one of his darkest books.

It begins, “Like most of the trouble that’s happened in my life or that I’ve caused to happen, the trouble that happened that night started with a drink.” 

Nick Stefanos wakes up after having driven blackout drunk to the banks of the Anacostia River, only to find a murdered teenager. By the end of the novel, some justice has been served, but it’s the roughest kind, and Nick is back where he began: “Inside, the room was silent, bathed in blue neon. I went behind the bar. I poured myself a bourbon and pulled a bottle of beer from the ice.”

Elizabeth Hand

A multi-genre, multi-award-winning author, Elizabeth Hand has written four mysteries featuring anti-hero Cass Neary. In these four novels, Elizabeth Hand balances deep dives into photography, mythology, and history with Cass Neary’s dissolution and longing, her addiction and trauma, all while telling compelling stories. Cass’s fifteen minutes of fame began with Dead Girls, her book of photography published after she gained notoriety from her art show of the same name. 

Cass describes how she chooses her subjects: “I can smell damage; it radiates from some people like a pheromone. Those are the ones I photograph. I can tell where they’ve been, what’s destroyed them, even after they’re dead.” Cass herself is also damaged, perhaps from the death of her mother, perhaps from the benign neglect of her father, but comes unglued after a sexual assault.

All this backstory, found in Generation Loss, plays a role in the three succeeding books in the series: Available Dark, Hard Light, and The Book of Lamps and Banners, but it’s the last one in the series that I want to focus on. The first few sentences establish the mood for the novel and provide enough detail so that even readers who haven’t read the previous books can form a solid picture of Cass’s character: Much of the tube was still shut down. Another car had plowed through a Go Happy London! tour group the day before, this time near Tower Bridge. I’d taken the night train from Penzance, nodding off between shots of Jack Daniel’s before trying to resurrect my amphetamine jag with one of the Vyvanse I’d stolen a few days earlier.

The novel’s title is a reference to an ancient text of the same name, “rumored to have been written by Aristotle for his student Alexander the Great. Aristotle supposedly illustrated it, and there were handwritten notes to Alexander as well, and references to other people Aristotle knew. Eudemus. Plato.” The physical text has power, people around it die, and people who want to own it will kill.

But there’s more. Tindra Bergstrand, a gifted programmer, is developing Ludus Mentis, an app to heal. As she tells Cass, “But once I get the bugs worked out, the app can be used for all sorts of things. Trauma, insomnia, ADHD. Regulating mood disorders without drugs. Addiction. Libido. Everything.” The bugs are the problem, bringing trauma to the surface, rather than healing it, but the code embedded within the ancient text is the solution: 

Whoever wrote it had figured out how a combination of lights and symbols can change the way we think. Their book drew on knowledge that had already been around for thousands of years, things the ancient Egyptians knew, and the Sumerians, the Minoans. So “lamps and banners” is just shorthand for what we call code.

Cass’s skepticism informs her actions at the end of the novel. I hope Elizabeth Hand writes another Cass Neary mystery; the last lines suggest she might: 

Gryffin watched me as I stood, his expression almost wistful. 

He raised his glass to me and nodded. “Stay out of trouble.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” I said, and headed for the door.

What books do you like to reread, and why? Let me know in the comments.

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Tom Milani’s (www.tommilani.com) short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and online. His stories have been shortlisted twice for a Derringer, been an honorable mention for The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025 and selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026 and for The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2026. Places That Are Gone, his debut novel, will be reissued by Open Road Media this fall.