Review: "The Night Gardener" by George Pelecanos

Sometimes, you simply just like something, like a movie, song, or in this case a book. You do not have anything special to say about it, and you cannot writer a paper about how much you liked it, but you do feel that it is something you want others to experience as well. The Night Gardener by George Pelecanos represents a recent experience with this. I cannot really speak in depth about it, at least in an intelligent way, but I can say that it is really, really good in the way basic stories are. Pelecanos, who was a writer on The Wire, one of my favorite shows, brings a lot of cool qualities to this familiar detective story. He, along with Dennis Lehane and Richard Price, who also wrote for The Wire, are really at the forefront of crime fiction today (despite what James Ellroy might say) and all three possess different traits that make their books more than just hard-boiled fiction (which is not always bad, to be fair). Price takes a lot from 19^th century novels by focusing on the city, in his case New Jersey, making it a character equal to or greater than the stories’ human players. Lehane stories all have a strong sense of sentiment or nostalgia that makes them not only suspenseful, but great emotional roller coasters as well. Pelecanos is more straightforward, focusing on the people and making them the ones who move the story toward its conclusion, and not the writer’s pen. This novel starts in the year 1985 at a crime scene where a teenage girl has been murdered. She has been strangled and there is evidence of sexual assault. On the scene are two rookie cops Donald “Doc” Holliday and Gus Ramone, who are there to make sure not to screw anything up. Then, there is T. C. Cook, who is a local hero cop with a staggering success rate who is investigating these murders, all of which have names that are palindromes and all being dumped in near a community garden, causing the press to dub him “The Night Gardener”. We then move twenty years ahead. The murder was never caught, and Gus and Doc have moved on, with Gus staring a family and Doc living on the fringes of alcoholism and random hook-ups after being fired from the force. When a teenage friend of Gus’s son ends up dead, and has the same characteristics of the gardener killings, all three are swept up into a situation that will open locked doors and bring a lot of heartbreaking things to light. While not as tight as The Turnaround, with another plotline that just barely connects to the main one, it still packs an emotional wallop at the end when every thing comes to light and we see the tragedy that has unfolded. But it is not the end of the world for these people, and the end hints at a kind of indirect justice that we can be happy with. Not much else to say about this book, just that I liked it very much.

Rating: 5/5