The Night Gardener

In The Night Gardner, we are introduced to a trio of police officers at the scene of a crime, the third of it's kind...two rookies and one seasoned veteran. Outside of outlining them as determined, seasoned veteran that everyone looks up to (legend), Holiday, cop destined not to be a straight arrow, and Ramone a cop destined to be a straight arrow. The introductory section serves as a brief interlude to introduce the bare facts that the book is based on...the nature of the crimes (pedophilia, dumping bodies in community gardens, and the palindrome thing) and the men who ultimately solve them, sorta.

The largest chunk of the book wends it was through the murder of Asa, which has striking similarities to the original three crimes 20 year ago...and touch close to home for Ramone, because his son was once friends with the murdered boy. In the end, each of the four distinct storylines merge and become interconnected. This is my first encounter with Pelacanos' work...and he seems to have quite the loyal following. I can't say that I enjoyed The Night Gardner as much as others seem to, it had good bones and a compelling plot...but somewhere along the way, it just didn't quite pan out into a story I really got into.

For me, it was a struggle to keep reading, I almost gave up half a dozen times...there were so many characters and the perspective shifted throughout, there were four distinct storylines to follow, and it was heavy on the dialogue and light on compelling the reader to be interested or care about these people. If I had read this over more than two nights, I would have easily lost track of the characters (and their level of importantce at various times during the storyline) and had trouble remembering what was important when and why. I've read a number of other books with convoluted story lines where many tributaries eventually wind their way to the main point...but his one was just painful to navigate and for not that great a reward at the end. I will say that the second half was more intriguing than the first half...but beyond that I just didn't find much to love about this book.

In the end, The Night Gardner really doesn't seem to be a police procedural or even really a murder mystery...it really seems to be more of a commentary on how we live as people, how racial lines are drawn. Pelacanos presents some stereotypes and the characters live through the reality of them as we sit in our comfortable homes and experience it through them. In the end, we are mainly left with the unsatisfying feeling this book is really about dealing with the fact that murder, crime, race issues and the like aren't stationary events...that they flow out into the community as a whole and beyond, affecting us all, yet which never really seems to be "solved" or fixed. In the end, it was an ok way to spend a couple of nights...but I wouldn't add The Night Gardner to my permanent collection, nor would I be inclined to recommend it to others. It is an interesting read as a slice of life...accurate Washington D.C. place descriptions, up to date cultural and popular culture references...and it's certainly well written, but as a murder mystery, it doesn't quite make it for me.

This book kept me awake for two nights running. The first time, it was because the story was so good that I couldn't put it down. The next night, it was because even though I'd finished reading it, the book wouldn't let me go: I kept going back and rereading portions of it, haunted.

Everything works, here, and every piece seems perfect: the narrative (gripping, yet beautifully formed), the setting (no American city lives on the page more exactly than Pelecanos's D.C.), the dialogue (it's so right, he might have tape-recorded it), and--above all--the characters and the complex, tragic, unillusioned, and deeply humane understanding that commits them to your memory like living persons long after you have turned the final page.

Pelecanos has been a hell of a good writer for awhile now. With The Night Gardener, he becomes something more: someone whose writing can twist your heart wide open and change how you see the ordinary world.

I loved reading this book. I guess I was expecting a novel like this to be essentially about a murder and the hunt for the killer, with everything else working in service to that end, but what i found was that the real joy of this story was in its moments and conversations and rhythms, which were intoxicating and had the power to move me along all on their own. It is a crime novel almost as an afterthought, although there is plenty of blood and guns to keep the demons happy, but the real payoff is in its complex portrayal of the unpredictable and realistic human nature of the characters. In a genre that deals mostly in two-dimensional black and white characters, this book never stops surprising you with who does what and (most importantly) why.

Political correctness rules and ruins this lumpy and uneven book. Reads like an extra credit assignment for a corporate diversity seminar. It is also, despite some well-written parts, full of clunky and awkward prose like the opening of Chapter 26: "The next morning saw a buzz of activity in the Violent Crimes Bureau offices. Two bodies had dropped overnight, and assignments and pairings were being discussed." Yes, and passages of the novel were being written in the tedious passive voice.
The attempt at street talk does not ring true, the plot is rusty, and the whole thing is unconvincing. I thought Pelecanos was getting better, but this represents several steps backward.

Washington, DC, homicide detective Gus Ramone is unlike Dirty Harry or Harry Bosch or almost any of the maverick cops who, always ready with a smart one-liner, that fill the pages of modern crime fiction. "Ramone" is a straight-shooting, by-the-books humble investigator with strong family ties simply doing his best to "protect and serve." With Ramone as the centerpiece, the talented George Pelecanos pens a thoughtful and intelligent murder mystery the rises to near the top of the genre.

When a teenager is found dead any apparently murdered in a Washington DC community garden, similarities with a string of murders two decades prior send chills of a return of the never-caught serial killer through DC's Violent Crimes Division. T.C. Cook was the police sergeant in charge of the original investigations, now retired but still obsessed with the big case he was unable to solve. In an unlikely alliance with "Doc" Holiday, a once-partner of Ramone, Cook and the alcohilic Holiday team up to "help" Ramone, while at the same time hopefully burying old ghosts.

This is a well-crafted police procedural with more logic and emotion than action. The demons that trouble all three of the protagonists - Ramone, Holiday, and Cook - are carefully rendered and believable, and the story, if not exactly a page turner, is suspenseful and credible. All in all, a poignant spin on a familiar topic - a hauntingly realistic read that is well worth the time and money.

Twenty years ago, Detective Gus Ramone was a patrol officer at the scene of one of the infamous Palindrome Murders. Now, two decades later, a body had been found that seems to match the MO of the killer. The new victim, Asa Johnson, was a young black kid shot in the head and found in a garden.

Although not assigned to the case, Ramone investigates Asa Johnson's death. This is personal because he knows the family, and his son used to hang out with Asa. Then another homicide Ramone is investigating is linked to Asa's death. Fears grow that the murderer may strike again, and detectives race to track down leads.

In the meantime, two former police officers are drawn to the Johnson case. One, a retired detective, was the primary on the first Palindrome Murders. The other, a washout alcoholic, was the one who found Asa's body and anonymously reported it. Together, they try to revive the Palindrome cases, which has been colder than ice for years.

Multiple threads twist through the case, which grows more complicated by the chapter. In addition, Pelecanos weaves in the many issues facing Ramone's mixed-race family, especially given the impact of this case.

The writing in this novel is concise and readable. Street lingo is a bit heavy at times--which will make some readers wish for a glossary--but most of it can be figured out through its context. Besides the lingo, there are many scenes involving hardcore dealers. For most of the story, it isn't clear how these subplots fit in to the overall story. Although it becomes clear in the end, some of it was superfluous. While these scenes were as well written as the rest, the mystery would have been just as compelling without the deep point-of-view given to these threads.

This was a decent novel, but wasn't satisfying in the end. All answers will be revealed, but not the way readers of this genre generally appreciate.

Reviewed by Christina Wantz Fixemer
7/27/2006

There's Crime Fiction, and then there's Crime Literature. What distinguishes them?

It is, of course, an organic process. A writer cannot "intend" for this to happen, it must come of the work's own transcendence. It must be a combination of gift and inspiration.

In its purist form, perhaps, fiction becomes literature when the boundaries of genre are shattered in such a way that theme trumps content without conscious attempt to do so.

It's been done in the crime field consistently for years. Connelly achieved it with The Poet, Lehane with Mystic River, Crais with The Forgotten Man, Vachss with Two Trains Running. There are many more. You've read them, and you know the difference.

George Pelecanos has done so with The Night Gardener. It is a book full of character, nuance and power.

But before I get too serious here, it is also a gut-wrenching thriller that rewards the reader thoroughly on that level.

Pelecanos has set The Night Gardener squarely in his fictional universe, of course being the parts of Washington, DC that you will not hear about on the news. It's the part where people live, work, and die. People not involved in the workings of our government. Those people, of course, rarely live in DC, they live in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland, where they are safe from the district their condescension has, in large part, created.

If you don't know that now, you certainly will feel it when you spend any time in Pelecanos' DC It's one of the overarching principles that governs the stories he writes.

The Night Gardener begins in 1985, at a crime scene. A serial killer has struck again, committing what some in DCPD refer to as The Palindrome Murders, as all the victims' first names are exactly that. The killer has been dubbed The Night Gardener: All the victims are found in community gardens, dumped there under the cover of darkness.

It is here we are introduced to the three major players in Pelecanos' tale: T. C. Cook, a methodical homicide detective, and two partnered beat cops, Gus Ramone and Dan Holiday. In just a few paragraphs, Pelecanos' sets up character traits in each of these three men that become through-lines to his entire plot.

We then flash forward to 2005. Gus Ramone is now a detective on a major case squad, the Violent Crime Bureau. We enter his world right in the middle of things, as his squad is mid-interrogation, breaking down a perp's bravado methodically into confession.

Then we meet Dan Holiday. Pelecanos lets us know clearly that his life in the last 20 years has been anything but rewarding. He was bounced off the force, with assistance from his old partner, Gus Ramone, and is now free-floating as the owner of a small chauffeur service, compensating for the obvious loss with heavy drink and random sex.

It's during a brief sleep-it-off nap that Holiday witnesses something that he later realizes could very well fit in with the still-unsolved Night Gardener murders. And it doesn't take long to see that Holiday views this as a path to his redemption. To himself, and to his old partner. Pelecanos handles the tricky relational ground between these two with a realism that will strike a chord with anyone that has tried to mend a broken relationship, and that realism is one of the book's strongest underpinnings.

If redemption is the soul of The Night Gardener, its beating heart is family. Specifically, the father-son bond between Gus Ramone, a white cop in a mixed-race marriage, and his son Diego. The Ramone Family has taken extraordinary steps to provide Diego with the best education possible, and it's rapidly becoming clear to Gus the education he paid for is not worth its price, and might in fact be counterproductive to the ideals he wants his son to grow up with. The book really finds its emotional stride as we become more intimate in Gus' hopes and dreams as a father and a man. It's striking how, when Gus is home, there is NOTHING more important than the health of his family. I am so bored of seeing the obsessed cop forsake all that should matter at the alter of the Big Case, and it's one of the joys of The Night Gardener that Ramone rejects that path.

Blend into this situation the fact that a recent murder, witnessed in some part by Holiday, took a friend of Diego's as its victim, and the strands of theme and plot start to weave themselves together.

Down the road a ways, we are reintroduced to T. C. Cook. Now a retired widower, dealing with the aftereffects of a stroke, we learn he never really let go of the Palindrome Murder case, and when Holiday calls on him to bring him back in to what appears to be a new case, it sets another car on the rails of this story that seamlessly opens our hearts and minds to Pelecanos' intentions.

There are other story threads here that lead to a heart-stopping finale that explodes with high consequence in fine fashion. Pelecanos plants seeds throughout the book that blossom with drama and action. Heroes emerge, tragedy results, answers gleaned. Many are not what we expect to find.

Pelecanos narrates the proceedings with an unobtrusive style that pretty much gets out of the way and lets the reader decide the substance of things.

As longtime readers of Pelecanos' DC, I may yearn for more of Derek Strange. I may even wish to see self-destruction's poster boy, Nick Stefanos, show up. But wistfulness gets washed away by the pure power of Pelecanos' narrative in The Night Gardener. And that power is fueled by the things that, really, fuel us all: The desire to do for our family, and to live a life of consequence.

It's what makes The Night Gardener such a powerful piece of, yes, literature.

As far as crime dramas go, this is firmly mediocre. The story is okay and requires suspension of disbelief only sporadically, but the author's writing style is sometimes a distraction. Why do the African-American suspects always ask for Slice soda to drink? And they repeatedly make a point of asking for Slice. (Do they even make it anymore? I thought it was replaced by Sierra Mist). And another distracting detail is the author's way of giving so many people nicknames. You don't need to tell me that a guy's name is Ed "Smiley" Jones if you never mention "Smiley" again or there's not something significant from a story perspective about that nickname. That said, I liked the use of DC as the backdrop and if I was going on a plane ride, I would probably pick up another book by Pelecanos (but I wouldn't let anyone see what I was reading and then I'd leave it in the seatback when I deplaned).

Let me commence this review in saying that I interpret the content of a novel somewhat like a chess game. There is a beginning strategy, a middle game, and then the the finish or ending game. In most instances I have found good novels typically have great beginnings and middle games and then falter, in some cases drastically, in the final chapters. "The Night Gardener" is one of the few novels I have read in the last few years that I find nearly flawless. I could not put this book down.

The book begins discussing a 1985 Washington D.C. police department's unsuccessful attempt at solving a serial killing spree involving young children. T.C. Cook, a veteran homicide detective with a 90% success rate at solving murders retires a troubled man knowing the killer got away. Two rookies are also present at one of the crime scenes. Gus Ramone works his way through the ranks to become a seasoned homicide invesigator himself. Doc Holiday offers his resignation when it becomes apparant that he will be investigated by iternal affairs in what is really a bogus wrap. He resigns himself to a life of loneliness, wild women, and alcoholism.

Jumping ahead to 2005 we learn how the characters have aged/matured as a new murder with the same characteristics as the unsolved 1985 Night Gardener murders occurs in a city garden. Same M.O. but the characters have changed and evolved over the last 20 years.

Get this novel and put aside several hours to get into it. You may find you can not put it down and end up reading into the wee hours of the morning

It's page one of "The Night Gardener." It's 1985. A bunch of cops, of whom we're going to get to know three pretty well, are milling around a crime scene in Washington D.C. Teenage black girl whose body has been dumped in a community garden. Cops suspect murder is the work of serial killer the newspapers call "the night gardener." Cops call this murderer "the Palindrome Killer," because they believe he murders only teenagers whos first names are palindromes, that is, they read the same left to right or right to left. Current victim was called "Eve." Oy vey, say I. Even real-life Zodiac murderers, of which I can think of two, never attempted such highly selective murders. Still, I tell friends I won't finish a mystery that doesn't deliver a body in the first ten pages, and here's one for me right on page one.

We've got to wait to page 89, year 2005 by the author's calendar, to get the next one. And what does Pelecanos do in the intervening pages? Well might you ask. He's not addressing the mystery, that's for sure. His adult characters speak to each other a lot, all in Ebonics. His kid characters speak in Ebonics too, plus the very latest-up-to-the moment Pelecanos was writing this book: street slang, I expect. You can often figure out what they mean by context, but not always. One kid tells another," 'I got my eye on the new Forums.Them joints is wet.'"

Care to take a guess as to what he was talking about? And I bet that by the time this book was published, said teenagers had already forgotten said slang. Furthermore, in my old neighborhood, they'd call a guy like Gus Ramone, Pelecanos's principal mouthpiece, a whigger.

The book is overcrowded with characters and plots, making it tough for anyone, without the leisure to read it in one sitting,to keep them all straight. There is never any explanation given as to how any serial killer could be committing murders based on arcane examination of his victims' Christian names. Nor does Pelecanos actually resolve his story in a way that will satisfy many readers.

Mind you, Pelecanos is an experienced, highly-thought of writer, an independent film producer, an essayist, an Emmy-nominated writer on the HBO series "The Wire," and recipient of numerous international writing awards. His series of mysteries set in and around the Distric of Columbia has sold well. And he can write.

At one point, he has one of his black characters thinking,"/He/ liked the old stories about outlaws.... Men who just didn't give a good f--- about the law or if and when they'd go down. Having other men talk about you in bars and on street corners after you were dead and gone, that's what made a life worth living. Otherwise, wasn't anything about you that was special. 'Cause everybody, straight and criminal alike, ended up covered in dirt. For that reason alone it was important to leave a powerful name behind.'" Some of us might not agree with that philosophy, and many of us might not be in any position to judge it's popularity within that community. But it's well-written.

In sum, Pelecanos certainly has his fan club. But if you think that a book billed as a mystery must first be a mystery, you're not likely to join up.