The Good Cop Problem

On Melanie Anagnos’ ‘Nightswimming’

Paterson, New Jersey, 2002, Photograph, Getty Images

“Two of the big knocks against crime fiction,” according to writer Sam Wiebe, “[are] that it glamorizes the police and fetishizes female victims.” These are fair knocks, but also the very pitfalls that smart crime fiction exploits. For sharp practitioners, the genre becomes “a venue of tension where the justice system and the treatment of women is most criticized and debated.”

Melanie Anagnos’ new novel Nightswimming joins this tradition. Set in 1979 Paterson, New Jersey, it works within familiar procedural rhythms while pulling apart the myth of institutional virtue. There’s suspense, noir mood, even moments of humor, but the book’s real commitment is to structural inquiry, particularly around power imbalances between men and women, corruption, and how the “good” cop endures.

The story begins with a double homicide: Randall Low and “late night girl” Cindy, closing up RJ’s Taproom, are murdered after a conversation about the Star Wars sequel. Enter Jamie Palmieri, rookie cop, never-was boxer, raised by his “sharp-elbowed” aunt, now eating alone in a late-night diner haunted by memory. The murder case is handed to him as a “get your feet wet” assignment. He’s meant to observe. Instead, he digs, and his sleuthing will “shake up the department. Possibly disgrace it.”

Jamie’s transformation from backbencher to detective, through a long winter where the night air “feels like glass,” is the heartbeat of the novel. He works the case by instinct and proximity, reading the body language of suspects and lingering around scenes. This lurking teaches him the ropes, but it also allows the novel to find comfort in ambiguity. As Jamie gets closer to the truth, he also gets closer to the rot.

The procedural story is straightforward, even rigid at times. The italicized chapters from the killer’s perspective don’t add much. They muddy the tone more than they deepen it. The central crime, while structurally necessary, occasionally loses urgency as Jamie’s inner life begins to take over. More than anything about the murder, I will take away from Nightswimming a scene where Jamie realizes a “hefty blueberry muffin” was the kind of “not-entirely-cooled-off, falling apart baked good that demanded a fork.” Now that’s detective work.

Jamie’s inner life, though, is where Anagnos excels. He’s a man of his time, but also skeptical of it. Yes, he drives a red sports car, owns aviators, and hangs with men who “do more drinking than talking.” But he’s also deeply uneasy in the role he’s supposed to play. When he meets Missy, a merch-table worker at a rock show who soon moves in with him, the novel shifts. Missy’s presence softens Jamie, and the relationship becomes a site for both tenderness and critique.

There’s real insight in how Nightswimming stages power imbalances between men and women. Missy, Cindy, and Sandy (yes, there’s also a Sandy) are young women trying to become independent. They’re not only romantic objects or symbols but also case studies in the limited choices available to them. The novel tracks how male desire, especially male desire in uniform, becomes a form of control. These women aren’t protected. And often — especially without the “good” cop — they’re absorbed and forgotten.

Jamie eventually grasps this. In a passage with the “good” cops, those “guys at the center of every award dinner and pool tournament,” Jamie rejects the culture of masculine detachment, “the code to not feel anything.” Instead, he chooses to be vulnerable. And he reflects on “the unmistakable truth of what Sandy and Cindy and Missy had in common”:

All three, girls trying to become young women, had been funneled into lives that were fraught and where they had to be careful. Falling in with the wrong people dragged the vulnerable down quickly. It was too easy for them to be washed over and erased.

Anagnos roots this systemic failure in Paterson itself. She knows the city and writes it with documentary focus. A historical photo graces the cover, and the pages are thick with references to dormant mills, trolley streets, and the wrongful conviction of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Paterson in 1979 feels like a place where time is stuck and nothing good will come of pretending otherwise. I was reminded of a remark made by saxophonist David Liebman: if you were a hippie in the 1960s, you didn’t take your long hair to Lodi or Paterson. Otherwise, you’d end up like the guys in Easy Rider — killed by bored cops on the open road.

At times, Anagnos overdoes the context. She name-checks William Carlos Williams, Junot Díaz, and “The Sopranos,” though curiously not Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane,” which captures the town’s fatalism: “In Paterson, that’s just the way things go.” These orienting gestures can feel like overreach and risk crowding the reader’s imagination. But the local passion is sincere, and for some, the assistance will be welcome.

In the end, Nightswimming is a compelling example of a crime novel that uses the genre’s comforts to prod at its failures. It does tell us what we already know — cops are corrupt and young girls are unsafe — but it tells it with grace and sensitivity. Jamie Palmieri is a “good” cop in a broken world. That may be the oldest trick in the book. But Melanie Anagnos puts it to use. The result is effective. Even comforting. The problem survives.

Stuart Ross is the author of The Hotel Egypt. Find him on X and Instagram @myskypager.