Customer Reviews

The Night Gardener

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This is what crime literature is all about. Pelecanos has risen to the top of the class following the classic Derek Strange novels with two grand slams in a row. Drama City and now The Night Gardner. As an aspiring author, I read this novel and thought, This is how it's done.

Pelecanos is at the top of his game. The portrayal of the main characters and supporting cast are fully realized. No cardboard cutout characters here. None are 100% good nor 100% bad, as in real life. Just when you think someone is too good to be true, we learn a new fact about them, that keeps it real. For example, Diego is pissed that he gets kicked out of convenience stores by Arab cashiers just because he's black. He did steal a few things from the store, but how could the cashier know that? Nothing and noone can be neatly placed into snugly-fitting pigeon holes. The "good" cop...not so good. The "bad" cop...sometimes moral, always on the periphery of redemption. The "ugly" cop...in some ways beautiful.

I also love the fact that the whole story does not resolve around who dunnit, like most police procedurtal crime fiction. Its more about the why dunnit and the shockwaves that pulse through people's lives as a result of past crimes.
You learn who dunnit, but that is not the payoff of the novel. The payoff is the portryal of the ripples of a twenty year old crime still reverberating through three mens' lives and through the lives of society.

Anyone looking for today's best crime literature out there, look no further. This is it.

In Southeast Washington, DC, in 1985, the police are baffled by a series of murders, teenagers shot and left for dead in a local community garden. The killer is quickly named The Night Gardener, his victim's names palindromes, spelled the same backwards as forwards. When the murders stop suddenly, the primary detective, JC Cook, "The Mission Man", is forced to abandon the investigation, later retiring with no resolution to the deaths. Two other notable officers are on the scene: Gus Ramone, new to the force, and Dan "Doc" Holiday, who will soon resign under a cloud of misconduct.

In 2005, twenty years later, a teenager's body is found in a community garden, one of the assigned detectives none other than Gus Ramone, who quickly notes the similarity to the 1985 crimes. The victim also happens to be an acquaintance of Gus's teenage son. Collateral events place Doc Holiday at the scene of the teenager's death; he, in turn, seeks out the expertise of JC Cook, who has never relinquished his desire to solve the Night Gardener murders. In an intricate mix of good cops, bad cops, criminals and the moral dilemmas of the modern world, Ramone sifts through a variety of scenarios, contacting Cook and Holiday by necessity; though no longer on the job, the two ex-cops and Ramone form an uneasy coalition in service to solving the crimes, old and new.

The author's intimate knowledge of the area adds to the authenticity of the novel, the rough streets, the citizens who live in the blighted neighborhoods, the story peppered with eccentric characters, lowlifes who prey on the helpless, overworked parents intent on saving their children from the dangers lurking on every corner. In the midst of encroaching gentrification, the daily chaos continues, a ceaseless battle against drugs, petty crimes, assaults, dealers and enforcers, a generation defeated by the promise of temporary oblivion, all as carefully constructed as a house of cards in the face of a hurricane.

It isn't the story, per se, but the storytelling that imbues this novel with its distinct heartbeat, people with nothing left to lose yielding ground to those who have the power to buy peace of mind and the opportunities that arise in the breach. Ramone, Cook and Holiday are humanized beyond the police procedural, juggling complicated moral challenges with the crimes that have defined their careers. This informative ride-along is successful on many levels, none of them boring. Luan Gaines/2006.

I've been a huge Pelecanos fan ever since I stumbled across "Shoedog" at my local library about a decade ago. He's definitely one of my favorite authors, and no one writes about my hometown the way he does (well, except for maybe Ed Jones). That said, this is among my least favorite of his thirteen books to date. Pelecanos has long used the crime genre as a way to tell the social history of the D.C. area, and that's part of what makes his books so great. However, in this one, the plotting is somewhat unsatisfying and the messages about race and class are just a bit too heavyhanded.

Pelecanos apparently decided to toss his hat into the vastly overpopulated serial killer ring after reading about the unsolved 1971-72 "Freeway Phantom" killings in and near D.C., and the book is dedicated to those victims. The story kicks off at a crime scene in 1985, where we are introduced to veteran Homicide Detective T.C. Cook and rookie patrolmen "Doc" Holliday and Gus Ramone. The deceased is the latest victim of a serial killer dubbed "The Night Gardener" for his nocturnal dumping bodies in community gardens. After this prologue, the book picks up in 2005, with Cook a widowed retiree still haunted by his failure to solve the Night Gardener cases. The alcoholic Holliday is working as an upscale car service, having been drummed out of DCPD years ago under a cloud of suspicion in an corruption investigation instigated by Ramone. Meanwhile, Ramone has stayed a cop, doggedly trying to be "good police", a good husband, and a good father to his two kids.

The eldest of these, 14-year-old Diego, is key character, as the murder of one of his friends, in circumstances awfully similar to the Night Gardener M.O., brings Ramone, Holliday, and Cook back together. However, the book also spends a good deal of time on Diego and Gus's relationship and the difficulties of raising a dark-skinned kid in an inherently racist world. These sections stand out from the procedural aspects of the serial killer storyline, and resonate with heartfelt truths (no doubt influenced by Pelecanos' experiences raising his own adopted children from Brazil). Diego's struggle to get along at his new suburban school, and Gus' attempts to both defend him from the injustices of the world and teach him about how to handle them like a man eclipse any of the story's crime elements.

As the serial killer plotline meanders along, Holliday and Cook join forces to reopen the Night Gardener "cold case" on their own civilian terms -- each with something to prove to themselves. Ramone ends up reluctantly helping them, even though he's not assigned to the case himself. Ultimately, the book's point is that such killings can't ever be solved, or even explained -- but rather how they affect the people concerned. While this is in one sense a welcome alternative to the standard serial killer story in which everything is wrapped up in a neat bow and the killer's psychological motivations are revealed, it also leaves a sense of incompleteness. By the end, one gets the distinct sense that the various subplots were far more interesting to Pelecanos than the serial killer plotline. Nonetheless, there's still plenty to like. D.C. and the 'burns come alive as in all Pelecanos' work, and there's plenty of police procedural detail (clearly influenced by his work on the HBO series "The Wire"), street argot, cars, music, and men being men. It's not bad book, it's just a bit more muddled than usual, which brings it down a notch from his standard.

First, let me say that I'm a huge fan of Pelecanos. I think some of his earlier books are brilliant, and even his worst books are better than almost anything else coming out these days.

That being said, though, I was hugely disappointed with The Night Gardener. I get the feeling that Pelecanos wanted to tell a deep, thoughtful, detail-rich story about three interesting cops but just didn't have a plot to go with it so he hashed together something about a serial killer just to give the book some purpose. Well, this idea failed miserably. The "plot" of the book is this; years ago, someone was killing kids and leaving the bodies in city gardens. The victims all had several things in common. The crime was never solved. Now, 20 years later, another child is found dead in similar fashion. Has the killer returned after all these years? Two former cops and one guy who is still a cop want to find out.

It sounds interesting at first, but guess what? This plot is pushed so far to the back of the book that all we really get are long, detailed scenes of guys sitting around and thinking about other stuff, plus a strange sub-plot about two wanna-be gangsters which has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the book. When the "mystery" about the serial killings is finally "solved," it is done so in a cheap, throwaway fashion that makes the reader say "I plowed through 430 pages just for this?"

My advice? Skip this book and read an earlier Pelecanos book like Nick's Trip or Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go.

I haven't read every crime author's work, but I have read works by a number of those considered to be top echelon writers and, for my money, Pelecanos is the hands down best of the bunch. And of his work, The Night Gardener is one of the best novels.

If this were a sporting event instead of a crime novel, ESPN would make it an "Instant Classic". It has great characters, a great plot, outstanding settings and surprises. It's a solid effort by a very gifted author. If you like crime novels, get on it. You won't be sorry.

A disclosure -- my primary reading passions are history and travel essay literature, as opposed to mysteries and detective novels. But take me at my word, I stayed up way too late two nights running to finish "The Night Gardener". As someone who relocated to DC within the past year, and as a bit of an idiot savant when it comes to geography (see "travel essay" literature above), I found this book as sharply focused and as accurate in its depiction of the back streets of my city as Google Maps, as real as page 3 of the Washington Post "Metro" section, or as the police blotter in the Thursday "District" supplement. Pelecanos' grasp of dialogue simply crackles, and his characters, from cops to hoods to the folks in between are keenly drawn with pointillist precision. Pelecanos' plot handling is masterful. He doesn't so much unfold the plot as he gathers it in evidence sweeps, leaving the reader as tantalized and as challenged as his perplexed characters on the MPDC -- and then at intervals during the narrative the plot twists on itself like a Mobius strip. If you've seen posters for "The Night Gardener" on the Metro on your rides to work, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of this book. If you're a tourist whose sense of our city is bounded by the museums and monuments on The Mall, this book portrays some of what happens beyond the rooftops visible from the OTHER side of your hotel. A great story, masterfully told.

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