The Night Gardener

After a hard boiled diet of recent Elmore Leonard works -- Pagan Babies, Up in Honey's Room and The Hot Kid -- I've started a flat-out binge of crime novels. I devoured Michael Connelly's Echo Park and The Lincoln Lawyer in short order. Great pacing, solid research, good locales but the dialogue falls flat. Just doesn't have the snap of Leonard at his best. And after the gun play in The Hot Kid and Honey's Room, I wanted more action. I can see these 30s and 40s stories in my head and now I want to write one myself. Something about a bar in the northern suburbs that operates outside the law in the early 1950s. Smoke, whiskey, dames in lingerie and pistols at the ready.

Wanting more noir, I checked out George Pelecanos' The Night Gardener. Despite being centered around a hackneyed serial killer plot -- all the murder victims' names are palindromes, as in Eve, Asa and so on -- this one is officially under my skin. The sentences are heavier than most thrillers, the characters are fuller and sadder and the book's feel is damned realistic. I am hooked, and I want to finish it tonight but I also want to savor it. No higher praise for a book.

On deck: The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta, Soul Circus by Pelecanos, and a collection of early Dutch Leonard crime novels. Life is good.