You can’t drive through a George Pelecanos novel with the doors locked and windows sealed. He doesn’t allow it. His books have an immediacy and tension that put the reader face to face with troubled lives. And in “The Night Gardener,” Pelecanos is at the top of his form.
The characters in “The Night Gardener” are searching more for answers than for elusive justice. The work is held by a web of stories, primarily about cops – good or beaten or simply rotten – and the work and families that form their lives. In contrast to the comparatively well-ordered lives of the law enforcers is a parallel thread, one of bottom-feeding street gangsters.
Gus Ramone and Dan (Doc) Holiday were rookie cops in 1985 when they were assigned to control the perimeter of a crime scene involving the third victim in a serial killing spree. They joined Sgt. T.C. Cook, the lead homicide investigator. The teenaged victims – Eve, Otto and Eva – were black; the press dubbed the deaths The Palindrome Murders. The police came to call the perpetrator the Night Gardener, because of his habit of shooting his teen victims in the head and leaving them in public parks, near gardens.
The chain of killings stopped at three, but the murderer was never apprehended. Now, 20 years later, only one of the officers remains on the force. Cook is retired, haunted by the unsolved case. Holiday left the force under a cloud and is an alcoholic operating a limousine service. Ramone is working in the Violent Crime Branch of the Washington, D.C., Police Department.
The Palindrome Murders had been left to molder in the cold-case files until the death of Asa Johnson. A middle school student, and a one-time friend of Ramone’s son, Diego, Asa’s slaying has all the markings of the return of the Night Gardener. Asa is dead of a gunshot wound to the head, his body left near a community garden. The weapon is nowhere to be found.
Ramone remembers the work of the Night Gardener and reconnects with his old partner. Holiday, in turn, contacts Cook. The three, in loosely organized and tentative cooperation, look for the truth behind Asa’s death.
The tale is enriched by a number of subplots. Ramone’s family, Holiday’s struggles with his life, Cross’ dedication to the crime victims, and young men either embracing or trying to escape criminal life work together to make the story live.
“The Night Gardener” is certainly a work of crime fiction, but Pelecanos has never fit neatly into the genre. His focus is many-faceted, and his stories are larger than the initiating event. He paints a gritty picture of what can happen when people care and take charge of lives, as well as what happens when things are left to slide.
Violent crime is ever before us, and while journalistic reporting is adequate for presenting what happened, it can be woefully inadequate in saying why. What sets Pelecanos above many of his peers is not that he’s good at revealing what happens, which he is, but he’s exceptional at revealing why.
Contributing factors can be societal, personal decisions or even just bad timing adding up to a chain of events that is explicable, but not necessarily pretty. In the end, “The Night Gardener” is powerful not because it is a good story well-delivered, though it is both of these. It is powerful because it uses all the power of fiction to answer questions that nonfiction never will be able to fully address.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
The Night Gardener
By George Pelecanos
Little, Brown, 384 pages, $24.95
