Woodrell and Pelecanos are widely written-up as two of America's finest young crime writers, genre specialists in a tradition that is for many defined by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and to an extent their early work in many ways conformed to the popular idea of the archetypal American thriller. But their recent books and the people in them are worlds apart from the classic wisecracking style for which Chandler, especially, provided the brilliant template, the bristling blueprint of laconic nobody under complicated duress.

Woodrell first came to prominence with the 'St. Bruno' trilogy - a trio of books set in a funky bayou town featuring maverick cop René Shade that had more than a little in common with the hard-boiled regionalism of, say, James Lee Burke. His last book, however, the tremendous Tomato Red, broke new ground. In it, pathetic small-time crook Sammy Barlach gets involved with a family of helpless white trash losers, whose already impoverished lives are made poorer still by a cruel and uncaring local community that visits serial indignities upon them. For their refusal to submit weakly to the ways of a wretched world, they pay in the end a ghastly price, the book ending with a shocking act of violence.

Tomato Red was ultimately about the way that society devours those among its constituency who are most vulnerable, most expendable; are most easily lost, written off and destroyed. It was an unforgettable book, an extraordinary evocation of a fucked-up world, rotten to its heart, written with enormous lyricism and fuelled by a barely contained sense of outrage. Woodrell's anger at the way things often are clear on every page. You wondered - reading it for the second, third, fourth time - whether he could improve upon it. It's taken him a couple of years, but with The Death Of Sweet Mister, he surely has. It's a masterpiece.

Sweet Mister is set in the same Missouri hill country as Tomat Red, and covers one summer in the life of a fat and lonely 13-year-old named Shug, who lives in the caretaker's cottage at the local cemetery with his addled, hard-drinking mother, Glenda, and REd, her vilent, criminally inclined, pill-popping husband.

Woodrell brilliantly describes a ruined world of poverty, tough living and an habitual criminality into which Shug is irresistably drawn. He's used by Red and his appalling partner Basil to carry out burglaries and break-ins they are either too drunk or stoned to handle themselves. Shug's only reward for this incessant law-breaking usually being a fierce slapping. Shug is brutalisd by Red, loved too much by his desperate, worryingly amorous mother - another apparent innocent made weird and not quite dependable by a social order in which she and her kind are thought to be mere flotsam in the larger swarming sea of things.

As ever, Woodrell's prose is rich and exotic, as rhapsodic as Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor or Cormac McCarthy, expert in the vernacular of injured bewilderment. Shug's hesitation maturing nastily into an appalling cynicism as the terrible story develops in ways you weren't expecting and Shug's relationship with Glenda becomes more intimate, his longing for her assuming an erotic intensity that brings down a ton of woe on everybody.