THE NIGHT GARDENER, the fourteenth novel from award-winning author
George Pelecanos, offers yet more evidence of a writer at the top
of his game.

The title refers to a series of murders in 1985 that forms the back
story to this novel. The victims were all teenagers, their bodies
found in public gardens. The detective assigned to those cases was
T.C. Cook, a legend among his peers and the object of the
admiration of two very different patrolmen, Gus Ramone and Doc
Holiday, who are on the scene of what appears to be the last of the
Night Gardener murders to handle crowd control.

Fast-forward 20 years and Gus Ramone, now a hard-working,
straight-arrow homicide detective in the District of Columbia's
Violent Crime Bureau, is happily married and the loving father of
two children. Ramone has played by the rules and built a life that
is comforting, if not entirely comfortable. A white man married to
a black woman, Ramone struggles to balance his career
responsibilities with those of raising a happy, healthy and secure
family in a society whose borders are defined by middle-class
hypocrisy on one side and urban crime and violence on the other. In
the confluence of those forces, Ramone's teenaged son, Diego,
struggles to define himself, his passage into manhood a tightrope
walk between the shadows and the light of contemporary
society.

In contrast to Gus Ramone, Doc Holiday has taken a different path.
His passion for police work and admirable if prestige-driven career
goals have fallen prey to personal sensibilities that are the polar
opposite of Ramone's. Holiday's law enforcement career ended when
he left the force rather than face an Internal Affairs
investigation headed up by Gus Ramone. Holiday now earns his living
as a private chauffer, his free time invested in too much booze,
meaningless one-night stands and frequent, bitter consideration of
what might have been.

T.C. Cook is now a widower, and each achingly slow day of his
retirement is like the last, marked by loneliness and by
resignation to the aftereffects of a stroke that, while relatively
minor, do far more damage to his wounded psyche as regular
reminders of what he once was.

When the body of a teenaged boy, an acquaintance of Ramone's son,
is found in a public garden, the forensic evidence and
circumstances of the boy's death bear too strong a resemblance to
the now 20-year-old Night Gardener murders. The case becomes the
catalyst that draws Ramone, Holiday and Cook into a discomfiting
and uneasy reunion, where the regrets of the past and the
possibilities of the future intersect.

THE NIGHT GARDENER is as fine an example of crime fiction as one is
likely to find. But to pigeonhole this book in even that
well-respected genre is to do Pelecanos an injustice. The richness
of color and detail, the power and pacing of the narrative, and the
story's emotional depth place Pelecanos squarely in the company of
John Le Carre, Richard Price, and a handful of others whose skill
transcends the confines of genre. Pelecanos has produced a crime
novel that rewards readers with an experience that satisfies on a
level not limited to mere entertainment.