In the bygone age of 1985, detective TC Cooke, with young cops Gus Ramone and Dan Holiday in tow, tried to save a string of murders dubbed the Palindrome Killer, aka the Night Gardener, and failed. Twenty years later, a murder with the same telltale characteristics occurs. Has the killer resurfaced? And can the three men, now in vastly different lives, crack the case?The Night Gardener is a police procedural mystery set in Washington DC. At least, at first glance. It's really the tale of fathers and sons, secrets, and redemption. Gus Ramone, a veteran homicide cop, has his life shaken when a friend of his young son's turns up dead of a gunshot wound in a community garden. Since the young man's name is Asa and the situation is similar to the decades old Palindrome Killer crime, the police speculate there is a link. Retired cop TC Cooke and disgraced former cop Dan Holiday both get wind of it and launch an investigation of their own. Couple that with the story of some rival gangsters and a briefcase of stolen money and it's off to the races.Much like the rest of George Pelecanos' novels, music, basketball, and car talk are often featured in the dialogue. Derek Strange's wife and dog make cameo appearances, as does Pelecanos himself as an unnamed passenger in a limo driven by Holiday. I kept waiting for one of the characters to get a drink at The Spot so would could check in with Nick Stefanos but it was not to be. Pelecanos revisits familiar themes like racism and what it's like to grow up black and poor in Washington DC.As usual, his characters come right off the page. Ramone wants more than anything to keep his family safe. Holiday wants a chance at redemption. Cooke wants to solve the case that haunted the final days of his career. Even the bad guys were far from one dimensional. Several knew they were in over their heads and acted accordingly.The revelation about Asa's death and what led him down that road were pretty hard hitting. The big gunfight was even more brutal than I thought it was going to be. The ending for the rest of the characters wasn't what I was expecting but was fitting.Every time I return to the Washington DC of George Pelecanos, it's like I never left. As usual, Pelecanos kept me entertained for the duration. 3.5 out of 5 stars.
The side of me that can get sucked into watching a Law and Order: (X)* and then watch the next eight episodes also airing that day enjoyed this book. The part of me that feels disgusted with myself after an orgy of Dick Wolf created police procedurals didn't care for this book so much. Reading the police procedural stuff I could feel the critical part of my mind snapping off. I'm surprised that I didn't leave the subway coming home last night with paper cuts from turning the pages so fast. I can usually read fifteen to thirty pages on my commute, and I read twenty pages of this book on the first morning I brought it to work on the train. But last night I clocked in fifty-five pages, without any delays. The book had the satisfaction of a sugar rush though. There was promise of more than cheap entertainment here, but it never really developed. Pelecanos can do better than this, and the other novels of his that I read do do (hahaha, I said do do, like poo) better than this one. Not that this book is bad, it's very entertaining, but it's not good. The police stuff is ok, but in a post Homicide/The Wire (ok not post The Wire but The Wire was already in full swing when this book came out) there needs to be more. More what? I don't really know, I don't normally read this stuff, but portraying cops are regular folks with there own good and bad sides and all of that can only be taken so far, there needs to be something else behind the story, and in this book the story seemed to never really catch. Although, even without a satisfying story this was still a very entertaining book to read. * where X stands for either the original LAO or any of the spin-offs.
What do You think about The Night Gardener (2006)?
I read this book initially thinking it was a classic/thriller mystery but was sorely disappointed. The crux of the story didn't actually develop until over 150 pages. There was a lot of time spent on crude, back and forth dialogue between the police characters that felt more like screenwriting than a novel. Rather than providing a resolution to the crime mystery that was presented, the book becomes more of a fable on what it really means to celebrate diversity and waxes philosophical about the meaning of success. While I think these are great points to make, they seemed better suited for a blog.
—Brandi
This is a many layered book. The mystery itself is a fine one, one whose ending I didn't see coming. (But then, I'm not one who usually guesses "who done it," anyhow, probably because that's not why I read mysteries.) Other twists were more obvious, but no less enjoyable for that; they're well done. It's the other layers--character, fatherhood, love (and lack thereof), relationships among co-worker cops, the city itself--with which Pelecanos works his greatest magic. The young men in this novel, the problems that beset them, and their responses to life ring exceptionally true. Youth are neither patronized nor romanticized, but respected as full-fledged characters. Finally, there is the matter of race relations in a complex setting & situation. Pelecanos does seem to give the cops a break here, with very little explicit racism on the part of the police. Those who beat & back-shoot African American men don't make an appearance, although to be fair the novel is set in DC, not Miami, LA, or Cleveland, and a number of the police in question are themselves African Amerian. The racial honesty shows in Ramone's ruminations on race here and there throughout the novel. As with the youth, this white character is not romanticized, but portrayed straight-on. I don't know that this is the model for socially conscious detective novels, as Laura Lippman suggests in her comments, but it is close enough to have reminded me of why I took up with those in the first place. It's less explicitly political than Paretsky's work or Burke's "Tin Roof," yet as surprising in its way as Connelly's "Angels Flight" was . . . a sort of gritty member of this family.
—L
Nobody captures the life of the Washington, DC citizen as George Pelecanos. He doesn't write about thepoliticians, power brokers and party-happy elite of the upper class suburbs, but the ordinary people of the city as they struggle to raise families and go to jobs among a criminal element determined to make their lives difficult.In The Night Gardener , Pelecanos' theme is ambition, and the way it can set a direction for life, or an early death. It's set against the backdrop of a cold case from 20 years earlier in which three teens were brutally murdered. The perpetrator was never found but now may have resurfaced. Three policemen who were there at the beginning, now become involved in ways that may alter the way they look at the world after all these years.A solid procedural that deals with human interest issues in a realistic way. One of Pelecanos' best.
—David
