Another great book review by Apostolos Vasilakis over at Greekworks.com. This time it’s a review of George Pelecanos’s The Night Gardener. Vasilakis begins the review with a quote from Petros Markaris, the Greek crime writer (Deadline in Athens) who was the subject of Vasilakis’s previous reviews. The quote:

[The] detective novel becomes more and more social….It’s not going to be long before we define the detective novel as a social one with a detective plot.

Vasilakis uses this quote because he wants to draw our attention to Pelecanos’s talent for “reflect[ing] accurately on urban life.” Pelecanos “portrays the people and the astonishing streets and neighborhoods of the American city with such vivid but realistic strokes.”

Read also:

The Salon.com review.

An excerpt.

The following from the publisher:

They never found the killer. All they knew, back in the winter of 1985, was that someone was taking teenagers, killing them and leaving their abused bodies in public parks. Three victims in all, with no link between them except a oddity of their names. They read the same back-to-front - Otto, Ava and lastly Eve. A lot has happened in the twenty years since. Detectives Gus Ramone and Dan Holiday - two of the leads on the case - have pursued very different paths. Gus has climbed to the heights of Detective Sergeant and built himself a reputation as a very good cop, whilst Dan has been drummed out of the force - his sleaze finally getting too much for his superiors. However, their paths are about to cross again. A boy named Asa - a close friend of Gus’s teenage son - has been found in the public park, his skull shattered by gunfire. Now it seems that both men are once again in the path of this disturbed serial killer. THE NIGHT GARDENER is George Pelecanos’s stunning new crime thriller - the story of two very different men united by the maliciousness of a deadly attacker.