FICTION The Night Gardener from George Pelecanos Little.

FICTION

The Night Gardener

from George Pelecanos

Little, Brown 372 pages, $2495

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

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

Not that anyone at any time really can "solve" a slay 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?

on the other hand 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 virtuous guys aren't all good, calm when they're cops; the bad stays aren't all bad; justice is something that might not ever be found; and evil doesn't reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] point from nowhere, it builds from what kids procure and don't get, in their households and their schools.

Like abundant 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 manslaughters "Mission Man" T.C. Cook was the lead detective.

Twenty years later, no other than Ramone is still a cop and, despite a lack of ambition, now a detective sergeant investigating violent crimes. Holiday, a drunken and a womanizer, washed gone out He quit the department rather than face an internal-affairs investigation for helping a prostitute, and now scours his own small limo company. tamper with retired and living with the powers of a stroke, is haunted according to his inability to find the kill cruellyed teens' killer.

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

A Pelecanos main division always drips authenticity -- The Night Gardener more than chiefly from the police-procedural details that waste away too much of the story to the genuine and revealing conversations detective Ramone has at fireside with his wife and son to the exchanges between on-the-fringe gangsters, the bigtime wannabe and his cousin, who wants not at home not out of any thinking principle of right and wrong nevertheless because he doesn't want to period up killed or back in prison.

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

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

Like any proper song, The Night Gardener -- the same of Pelecanos' stand- alone mysteries, although it includes a cameo by the agency of a minor character in his earlier main division s -- has its own harmonious flows It builds slowly, taking more than 100 pages to establish its characters and behold its story finally start moving. Newcomer won't appreciate the wait. For longtime readers, allowing Pelecanos has earned that patience.

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

Paul Saltzman is metro editor for the Sun-Times.

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