The Night Gardener

About two years ago I read my first George Pelecanos book, Drama City, a terrific thriller about the mean streets of Washington, D.C. While The Night Gardener isn't as strong as that book, it's a great read nonetheless, with great characterization and lots of details about crime and detection in the nation's capital.

The book opens in 1985, with another victim of a killer called either The Palindrome Killer (all the victims have names spelled the same frontwards and backwards) or The Night Gardener, as the victims are found in community gardens. The detective on the case, T.C. Cook, is obsessed with finding the killer. On the scene are two uniforms, Gus Ramone and Dan "Doc" Holiday.

The palindrome murders stop without the killer being caught, and we flash forward twenty years. Ramone is now a detective, and Holiday is off the force, resigning over an indiscretion and now working as a limo driver, pickling himself in booze and having a string of one-night stands. When one of Ramone's sons schoolfriends, a boy named Asa, turns up dead in a community garden, it looks like the Night Gardener may be at work again. Holiday discovers the body, and looks up Cook, who's now retired, to conduct their own investigation.

This book is not so much concerned with the whodunit aspect as it is with the characters of those involved. Ramone is a family man in an interracial marriage, with a teenage son he hopes to keep on the straight and narrow, which is no easy thing in D.C. Holiday, who knew he was a good police officer, is bitter about his leaving the force, and Cook, who has suffered a stroke, has long been haunted by the unsolved case. Each is depicted with excellent passages that make the men seem like real people.

There's also a parallel story about young black men who seek their fame and fortune in crime, and the dirty cops who profit from them. At first you may be wondering what connects these two story threads, until you realize that it's part of a larger picture that Pelecanos paints about the desperation that exists on the mean streets of Washington.