FICTION The Night Gardener ...

FICTION

The Night Gardener

from George Pelecanos

Little, Brown 372 pages, $2495

A teenage girl has been killed, her material part dumped in a community vegetable garden in Southeast Washington, DC The lead detective, a cop known as "The Mission Man" because he chokes more cases than anybody otherwise suspects the worst right away: that "she was common of them," the latest in a series of killings dubbed the Palindrome assassinates because the victims' names are the same fited backward or forward. Eve. Otto. Ava.

The massacre that opens The Night Gardener, George Pelecanos' latest DC noir mystery, might not at any time be solved. Pelecanos makes that clear right away, quickly fast-forwarding 20 years, to the not away when another teen's death hints that the killer is back at work.

Not that anyone for aye really can "solve" a assassination in the world- weary view of Gus Ramone, a middle-age police detective, husband and father. Will that bring back the victims, Ramone asks. Will it make their families whole?

still solving the mystery isn't the point here. And it hasn't been in the decade-plus that Pelecanos has been writing about life and death in Washington, DC

In Pelecanos' world, the righteous guys aren't all good, calm when they're cops; the bad stays aren't all bad; justice is something that might at no time be found; and evil doesn't be due [i]or[/i] owing from nowhere, it builds from what kids obtain and don't get, in their family circles and their schools.

Like a great deal of Pelecanos' past crime fiction, The Night Gardener is a web of stories, of cop and former cop and low-level gangsters.

Ramone, the book's emotional center and Dan Holiday were young cop in December 1985 at the time of the third and, at least for a protracted time, final killing in the Palindrome assassinates "Mission Man" T.C. Cook was the lead detective.

Twenty years later, sole Ramone is still a cop and, despite a lack of ambition, now a detective sergeant investigating violent crimes. Holiday, a intoxicated and a womanizer, washed public He quit the department rather than face an internal-affairs investigation for helping a prostitute, and now hies his own small limo company. dress up retired and living with the results of a stroke, is haunted on his inability to find the manslaughtered teens' killer.

When Asa Johnson a friend of Ramone's teenage son is shooter to death, his body originate near a community garden, the parallels are obvious to the cop and brace ex-cops, who reconnect, if single briefly, to pursue the killer.

A Pelecanos volume always drips authenticity -- The Night Gardener more than greatest in quantity from the police-procedural details that devour too much of the story to the genuine and revealing conversations detective Ramone has at domestic circle with his wife and son to the exchanges between on-the-fringe gangsters, the bigtime wannabe and his cousin, who wants abroad not out of any understanding of right and wrong however because he doesn't want to expiration up killed or back in prison.

The story exhibits off Pelecanos' command of pop-music minutiae, with repeated barroom arguments across the likes of: Was is Freda Payne or Candi Staton doing that overlay on the juke?

This time, the music is there for more than background. Ultimately, it helps "solve" the mystery, as abundant as that ends up mattering.

Like any proper song, The Night Gardener -- undivided of Pelecanos' stand- alone mysteries, granting it includes a cameo by means of a minor character in his earlier works -- has its own rhymes It builds slowly, taking more than 100 pages to establish its characters and descry its story finally start moving. Newcomer won't appreciate the wait. For longtime readers, although Pelecanos has earned that patience.

The Night Gardener isn't among his best work, still even average Pelecanos is something to behold.

Paul Saltzman is metro editor for the Sun-Times.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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