Mysteries of the heart

GEORGE PELECANOS does not write for those seeking a stock crime novel, who like their books conventional, their plots pat and their endings neatly tied up. The dependability of these books is their lure. Readers know what they are getting when they pick one up and are reassured by the predictability.

Pelecanos writes a different kind of book: gritty, disturbing and unpredictable. His latest, “The Night Gardener,” does not have quick killings, breakneck pacing or a cast of cliched miscreants. The plot drifts at times, takes surprising detours and stalls out at key moments -- just like the trails of real homicide investigations. The characters are fully formed: interesting, quirky, unsettling, funny. Pelecanos writes about cops and criminals with an earthy flair and depicts how their personal lives intersect with their work.

“The Night Gardener” is not so much a crime novel as a novel about crime. Finding out who killed whom does not reign supreme. Pelecanos is willing to put the crime on hold while he sets the scene, develops his characters and portrays the different worlds into which he takes readers. He is more the heir of a novelist such as Richard Price, who pushes the boundaries of the form, than of mystery writers who adhere to them.

Pelecanos opens “The Night Gardener” in 1985. Two young patrol officers respond to the scene of a Washington, D.C., homicide, a community garden where the body of a 14-year-old girl has been found. She is the third victim in a series of killings the media have dubbed the Palindrome Murders because all the victims (Eve, Otto and Ava) have names that read the same forward and back. But the cops call the killer the Night Gardener.

One of the young patrol officers, Gus Ramone, is a straight-arrow, by-the-book cop: “Ramone had his own rules: follow the playbook, stay safe, put in your twenty-five and move on.” His partner, Dan “Doc” Holiday, is a rule-bending hell-raiser who is dating a Washington Redskins cheerleader. “Holiday was a joker.... His enthusiasm and natural fit for the job would probably get him further in the [department] than Ramone would go. That is, if that little man with the pitchfork, sitting on Holiday’s shoulder, didn’t ruin him first.”

The novel then flashes forward 20 years and reveals the seemingly inevitable fates of the two cops. Holiday’s life has been derailed by the little man with the pitchfork, and he has been forced to resign from the department after an internal affairs investigation into his conduct with a hooker. He is now an alcoholic chauffeur who lives alone in an apartment and hangs out with his drinking buddies at a local bar, regaling them with tales of his one-night stands. Holiday has been sleeping off a drunk in his car early one morning beside another community garden when he awakes and, while searching for a spot to relieve himself, stumbles across a corpse. The still unsolved serial murders in the book’s prologue are echoed when the body turns out to be that of a teenage boy whose first name is Asa.

The detective who catches the case just happens to be Ramone, who years earlier led the internal affairs investigation that forced Holiday out of the department. Ramone, now a detective sergeant in the homicide unit, is still more a plodder than an instinctive investigator, but he is a fair supervisor who is respected by his detectives. He is happily married with two children.

This sequence of improbable coincidences, and the all-too-familiar tale of a serial killer with a gimmick, is a jarring break from the realistic procedural tone that Pelecanos establishes in the rest of the book. But the plot is soon so absorbing, as Holiday launches his own investigation, that the reader quickly becomes lost in the narrative. Holiday is aided by T.C. Cook, the homicide detective who was also on the scene of the 1985 crime. Now retired, he has been slowed by a stroke.

The three men who responded to the earlier crime scene are now thrust back into the investigation. Before he dies, Cook hopes to solve the serial murders that have tormented him throughout his retirement. Holiday seeks redemption for a washed-out career and an aimless life. And Ramone, at first, is just trying to do his job and get home to his family at the end of his shift. But the professional becomes personal when he discovers that the victim, Asa Johnson, was friends with his son.

The characters come alive through telling details. When Pelecanos describes Cook’s hat, the reader immediately has a feel for the retired cop: “His dress Stetson, light brown with a chocolate band holding a small multicolored feather, was cocked just so, covering a bald head sided by clown patches of black hair flecked with gray.”

Pelecanos has always been good at portraying Washington, D.C.’s ghetto hustlers and dope slingers. His last book, “Drama City,” centered on Lorenzo Brown, an ex-con trying to stay straight while working as an officer for the humane society. He also wrote a series of novels featuring Derek Strange, a black ex-cop working as a private detective. In “The Night Gardener,” he takes readers into the world of big-city homicide detectives. He has said that it was only after he began working as a writer on the HBO series “The Wire” that he was granted access to the squad room of a homicide unit. He has parlayed that entree into crackling dialogue and a verisimilitude that animates the interrogations.

The book is also filled with poignant and powerful scenes from Ramone’s home life. His wife is an ex-cop, and his exchanges with her reveal how he has managed to stay happily married in a profession with such a high burnout and divorce rate. When he returns home after his unit has obtained a confession from a hapless killer early in the book, his wife asks, “Good day?”

“ ‘We had a bunch of luck. I wouldn’t say anyone feels good about it, though. Man wasn’t a criminal. He got crazy behind some crack and killed his wife because he was jealous and despondent. She’s in the morgue, he’s probably down for twenty-five, and the kids are orphans. Nothing good about that.’

“ ‘You did your job,’ she said, a familiar refrain in their home.

“He talked to her every night about his workday. He felt it was important, in that those cops who didn’t, in his experience, were headed for disasters in their marriages. Plus, she understood. She had been police, though now that seemed like a long time ago.”

Ramone, who is white, and his wife, who is black, have to contend with racism at the suburban high school their son attends. Ramone’s struggle to be a good father, to find the balance between being involved in his son’s life but not intrusive, is also finely wrought.

Pelecanos understands the brutality of the criminal’s world, but he also can reveal the anguish and heartache of the victim’s family. When Ramone tells the teenage boy’s father that the detectives are awaiting the autopsy results, Pelecanos conveys how anguished relatives have to contend with the brutal and bureaucratic in the wake of a killing.

“Johnson wiped his hand across his mouth. His voice was hoarse as he spoke. ‘They gonna cut up my boy? Why they got to do that, Gus?’ ”

“ ‘It’s hard to talk about this, Terrance. I know it’s hard for you to hear it. But an autopsy will give us a lot of tools.... ‘

“ ‘What can I do?’ said Johnson. ‘What can I do right now?’

“ ‘Next thing you have to do is come to the morgue at D.C. General tomorrow between eight and four. We need you to make the formal identification.’ ”

Some crime novel devotees might find the book’s plot a bit too meandering. The body of Asa Johnson, which kick-starts the investigation, is not found until the end of Chapter 10. But those who can appreciate a writer who transcends the genre will forgive Pelecanos’ transgressions and find “The Night Gardener” a powerful and compelling book.