Nightswimming, by Melanie Agnanos

Tags:  crime-fiction, detective-fiction,

Melanie Agnanos’ Nightswimming opens in the early hours of a cold January night in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1979. Owner Randall Low is closing up RJ’s Taproom, a bar and strip club serving a working-class clientele in a city that’s a few decades past its heyday. Dancer Cindy Kaczorek stands with him behind the bar when an unexpected visitor arrives. Hours later, a friend finds Danny’s and Cindy’s bodies in a pool of blood by the register.

We learn the sketchy details of the murders as the cops learn them inside police headquarters on Washington Street. Low was well known and well liked in the community, and the crime draws considerable media attention. Adding to the pressure, the Paterson police department is still reeling from the fallout of the Hurricane Carter case in which a well-known boxer was wrongly convicted of a murder the department could not solve.

The high-profile double killing is assigned to veteran homicide detectives Rick Andres and Marc Gianelli. Because there were no eye witnesses, the department sends patrol officers to interview patrons and neighbors, in search of anyone who may have heard or seen people entering or leaving the bar.

Among the young officers picking up scraps of the case is Jamie Palmieri, a patrolman who grew up on the streets he now polices. Palmieri is both street-smart and idealistic. He wants to do good, but he has no illusions about curing the world’s ills. He understands the limits of his power and works within them to make those portions of the world he can reach a little better.

His personal life is in transition. He sees less of his friends who have recently married and settled down, and he’s losing interest in partying and bar-hopping with his single friends. He devotes the bulk of his time and energy to work, where he looks up to the senior detectives, admiring their professionalism, the quality of their work, and the impact their work has on the community.

Palmieri, still low in rank, works side jobs to earn extra cash. On one of these, working security at a concert at The Meadowlands, he meets Missy Hollum. He enjoys their first date, the sense that there’s someone there to connect with. Though he can’t articulate it, the reader sees that in every aspect of his life, Jamie seeks substance. He’s at an inflection point, one of those periods we can’t always see as we’re living through them because the day-to-day realities can be intense and overwhelming. But when we see them in hindsight, when often realize that if one or two things had gone another way during that crucial period, our lives would have turned out completely differently. These are the periods of life we sometimes marvel at later and wonder how we pulled through.

Jamie is, above all else, earnest in his effort and pure in his intentions. He wants to do right by everyone. But again, he’s no fool. Growing up on the streets and in the boxing gym, he knows how the world works, who to be wary of, and how to assert himself against the worst elements of society. He’s a natural cop, if there is such a thing.

As the official investigation in the RJ’s double-homicide stalls, Jamie’s gentle persistence with witnesses and the trust he inspires in them results in a few thin scraps of information that lead him down an unexpected and very dangerous avenue. As the department quietly moves the murders from active investigation to cold case, the killer gets wind that Jamie is closing in on him, and both Jamie’s and Missy’s lives are literally on the line.

The strength of this book lies in the fully immersive telling. We are there with the characters every step of the way. We are living in Paterson in 1979, with its derelict shops, its street-corner addicts, the ice and slush and snow of a winter that won’t seem to let go, the delis and bars where the regulars all know each other. The soundtrack is Foreigner, Donna Summer, Hotel California. The women wear Wind Song perfume, the men, Aramis cologne.

Anagnos’ prose could be called hard-boiled for its clear-eyed economy and lack of sentiment. But unlike other hard-boiled mysteries whose tone conveys a weary sense of disappointment in a hopelessly corrupt world, the world of Nightswimming is infused with Jamie’s quiet conviction that, however bad you may find the world, there will be good in it if you bring good to it. This is the essence of the character to which others respond. This is the man whom even reluctant witnesses choose to trust.

The ability to convey such a character so clearly, subtly and convincingly takes a lot of skill. The author assumes from the beginning that the reader is intelligent and perceptive, and her writing rewards the reader who is willing to think and feel. Palmieri is a deep and engaging character inhabiting a rich, fully-drawn world. If the rest of the series is as good as this one, readers have a lot to look forward to.