HELL TO PAY, By George P. Pelecanos, Little, Brown: 288 pp., $24.95 BLACK WATER, By T. Jefferson Parker, Hyperion: 384 pp., $23.95

Walter Scott defined the novel as a fictitious narrative accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, which is why novels, in their 18th and 19th century heyday, were social novels. Then they became literary novels characterized by form, not content, their primary virtue being inaccessibility. The major remaining representatives of old-style novels are detective stories, mysteries and thrillers, which still tell tales of action “accommodated to the ordinary train of human events.”

George P. Pelecanos does this very well, and his “Hell to Pay” is a terrific thriller, a rip-roaring read. It is also a mine of information about cultures and subcultures in our land, specifically in Washington, D.C., where its action detonates an anthropology of black, brown and white lore, a topography of investigative activities, a geology of street and off-the-street crime in bombed-out-looking venues where handguns are snagged as easily as milk, where two out of three murders go unsolved, where politicians can be bought and sold as easily as T-shirts featuring computer-generated photographs of murder victims.

That’s the least we expect from a master of mayhem. The sociology of consumerism is thrown in as an extra. At the top of current comforts figures our long-standing addiction to cool hoopties like the Audi S4 and snazzy BMWs. We also get a product placement guide: Heineken, Bud, marijuana, Ecstasy, New Balance, a Canon AE1 camera with a digital zoom, Yamaha speakers, a People Finder browser (a database of Westlaw) and, of course, canned music.

It may not come as breaking news, but, in the popularity stakes, CD culture has overtaken car culture. Soul, gospel, slow jam, jazz, rock, rap, bebop, hip-hop and the rest are cited every sixth or seventh page, sometimes more than once. They mark not race or class but generation, not good or bad but young or old, and people grow old fast these days.

Beside such stage-setting, plot comes as an afterthought. Yet the plot too is intricate, fast-cut, fast-moving, compelling and perfectly satisfying. It concerns a passel of investigators hunting first a runaway teenager, then some evasive killers who demonstrate that small-time bad guys can be just as bad as big-time bad guys, although tawdrier. All the time the investigators (that is, the good guys) try to keep their anger in check, their violence in neutral and to remember that there is room for decency, love, friendship and, in the end, salvation, even in D.C. That’s what one wants to think, and perhaps it’s true. Even if not, the voice of Pelecanos--raspy, brutal, vivid, moving--is one not to forget.

Each day is the first day of the end of your life. For pretty Gwen Wildcraft in T. Jefferson Parker’s “Black Water,” her 26th birthday proves just that. For Gwen’s husband, Archie, an Orange County Sheriff’s deputy, it takes a bit longer. Detective Sgt. Merci Rayborn investigates. A year before, Merci arrested a fellow deputy for a murder of which he was innocent. Now she faces the apparent corpse of another cop and that of his wife in what looks like a murder-suicide.

But Archie, despite a bullet in his head, is still alive; and the case turns out to be far more complicated than prosecutors panting for easy scores like to think. Rayborn is determined to get things right this time, and it turns out that many wrong things and many wrong people compete for the investigators’ attention: Russian gangsters riding the law in the service of lawlessness; easy money made from miracle drugs (“Somebody turned twenty grand and snake poison into two million in less than a year, she figured fraud.”); worst of all, Archie, discombobulated by the bullet in his head but free and mobile, sets off to catch the creeps who offed his happy wife and happy life. Merci is all for crime and punishment but by the proper authorities, whom Archie no longer trusts. It all works out in the end, though not quite as you might expect. But enough happens in very few days to fill months of action, and the suspense keeps us alert for the next thunderbolt.

Parker, meanwhile, writes at the top of his form. He walks us through scene-of-crime procedures and through the uncertainties left standing when they are done. He juggles skeins of emotions (if you don’t like sentiment, introspection and reflectiveness, this is not your kind of book) and lets them make sense even when they don’t. And he never forgets that, as his namesake, Thomas Jefferson, almost said, the reader’s attention must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of vics and perps. “It is its natural manure.”