The Night Gardener by Geroge Pelecanos

Product Description
The haunting story of three cops; one good, one bad, one broken and the murder that reunites them in a showdown decades in the making. Gus Ramone is good police, a former Internal Affairs investigator now working homicide for the city’s Violent Crime branch. His new case involves the death of a local teenager named Asa, whose body has been found in a community garden. The murder unearths intense memories of a case Ramone worked as a patrol cop 20 years earlier, when he and his partner, Dan Doc Holiday, assisted a legendary detective named T.C. Cook. The series of murders, all involving local teenage victims, was never solved. In the years since, Holiday has left the force under a cloud of morals charges. Cook has retired, but he has never stopped agonizing about the Night Gardener killings. The new case draws the three men together, re-igniting the love, regret, and anger that once burned between them, and old ghosts walk once more as they try to lay to rest the monster who has stalked their dreams.

My thoughts
In reading “The Night Gardener” I thought it would be a murder mystery or thriller, but instead it is about the human condition. To begin, a murdered child is found in a garden twenty years ago and three cops are there. Jump to now, and a similar murder has taken place, which opens wounds for the three. Their lives are changed, yet they are still haunted. We come to learn about who these men are, what made them and how they get through their own lives. George Pelecanos has written an intense story of what is like to live and survive in and on the streets of Washington D.C.