The Night Gardener

The Night Gardener is a crime novel by the American writer George Pelecanos, published in 2006. It is set in Washington, D.C., and it follows three men whose lives have been shaped by the same investigation.

The original killings took place years earlier and stopped without an arrest, leaving a set of families in the city with no answer and a group of detectives with a failure they never made peace with. When a new body is found in a community garden, the detective Gus Ramone, the former officer Dan Holiday and another ex-cop, T.C. Cook, are drawn back into the case from three different positions: one inside the department, one who has been paid to look into it and one who never stopped. Pelecanos keeps the novel on the ground, in the neighbourhoods, gardens and corner stores where the crimes happened and where the men investigating them grew up, and the book is as concerned with what twenty years does to a police officer as with the identity of the killer.

The author writes about Washington beyond the government buildings, and the novel belongs to the tradition of American crime fiction that treats the city's ordinary streets as the real subject.