The Night Gardener (2006)

Ever since we listened to THE TURNAROUND in the car last summer, I've
been wanting to read more of George Pelecanos. I found THE NIGHT
GARDENER on my shelf of TBRs and put off some other things in order to
read it. After a slight groan when I discovered a serial-killer motif,
I pressed on and wasn't sorry. This was much more than a serial-killer
novel. Pelecanos, based on my reading of two books, is someone we
really need in American literature today -- a chronicler of the
working class. He has a fine ear for dialogue and regional speech, but
more than that, he sees what's important in working class lives and he
respects the people he writes about. (If any real sociologists are reading this, I
suppose some of his characters are more "lower-middle" than "working"
but I tend to lump them together.)

Where THE TURNAROUND's theme was fathers and sons and brothers, THE
NIGHT GARDENER is more about friends and colleagues, although the
family theme is a strong one as well. It's also about choices -- and
one might argue that the choices Pelecanos's characters are faced with
are often of much more consequence than those their wealthier
neighbors make.

When ex-police "Doc" Holiday, sleeping off a drunk, discovers a body
in a community garden, he remembers a series of killings from his
rookie days on the force. Former colleague Gus Ramone is also
interested, because the dead teenager was a friend of his son's.
Holiday involves retired Sergeant Cook, who had investigated the
still-unsolved killings 20 years previously, in a very unofficial
investigation, while the police do their procedural thing. Meanwhile,
we also see the lives of two cousins, one an ex-con and the other a
would-be criminal legend, and the choices they make. It doesn't become
clear until late in the book why this plotline is there, but it does
add to the book. Highly recommended; I'm glad to have "discovered"
Pelecanos and happy there are quite a few more books to read. ( )

Two young cops, partners, guard the perimeter of a crime scene where a young girl has been shot in the head and left in a community garden. The lead detective on the scene berates them for letting a bystander through when the woman throws up near the body. The homicide is one in a string of murders where young kids have been shot and left in community gardens with a small patch of their hair missing. Each child's name is a palindrome, spelled the same backwards and forwards.

Twenty years later one of the cops is in IA, one has resigned, and the detective is retired and sick. A young boy named Asa is discovered shot in the head on the edge of a community garden. All three are worried that a serial killer has begun again, and begin their own investigations. Eventually, they bump into each other and warily share information as they figure out if and how they can work together.

The book was okay. The narration was bad. I struggled to get through it. If the narration had been better, I probably would have liked the book better.

Some of the dialogue was a little weird, and some of the transformations in the characters was pretty sudden ( )

A better-than-average transport/airport book and of interest to anyone that's lived in the Washington area, especially around Silver Spring. For me, though, it wasn't as interesting as Hell to Pay, the previous Pelecanos book I read. That followed the case and meanderings of Derek Strange, an ex-cop detective. In the future, I'm going to make sure that a Pelecanos book features Derek. (And will someone make a movie or series based on this character?)

As with the earlier book, I found myself squinting, trying to imagine the parts of D.C. where our white cop Gus Ramone and other characters were wandering. Jeez, don't they ever pass through the "white" parts of town? "White" actually isn't the accurate term; I mean the parts of town where all the white-collar out-of-towners live and work, most of them transient residents.

The attempt to solve a murder, perhaps done by a resurgent serial killer, isn't the reason for reading The Night Gardener. You read it for Pelecanos' sympathetic renderings of people, especially kids, teetering on the brink of a life of crime or drug addiction. If Ramone's own mixed kid is unlikely to go down that route, we can see that some of his friends and classmates will.

And yet they're not do different than Ramone's son! They might even be more talented. But they have absent or abusive parents or a parent sent on a downspin when losing a job; they're just a bit lower down on the socio-economic scale. So, yeah, you can see the kind of writing and insider knowledge that Pelecanos brought to The Wire. ( )

Intriuging story, interesting characters. The writing is very weak at times. Details are told to us rather than shown. Dialogue unrealistic at times.The example of the old detective talking about how drug enforcing ruined policework is particularly bad. It's this long speech that seemed to come of nowhere. Okay George, we get what you're trying to say. Give the character more reason to say it rather than soapboxingPelecanos knows DC, the music parts are great, he knows the male gender, he knows cops. Again, the writing is just weak.No I don't normally read Genre fiction.Richard Price is a much better sort of genre, sort of non-genre writer ( )

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. ( )