For all the talk of Kent Anderson as the author of the "best police novel of all time" (Night Dogs) and "the most authentic Vietnam novel written by someone who was there" (Sympathy for the Devil), both of which are admittedly phenomenal—when you read his entire catalog in sequence, including the third piece of the "Hanson" trilogy (Green Sun), you realize he's up to something else entirely. Something darker, stranger, and more personal. The accolades may as well be incidental, but that doesn't make them inaccurate.

Green Sun carries on about 10 years after Night Dogs, longstanding protagonist and author-surrogate Hanson serving as a police officer for the second time after a stint as an English professor, now relocated from Portland to Oakland; an experienced cop starting over with a new job in a new town. Dark hijinks ensue.

Anderson is a poet of the streets, haunted by war, possessed of burning intellect and an eye for perfect details. Despite the marketing these aren't genre exercises. The books go so much further than that, painting an apocalyptic vision of a damaged and destructive (and self-destructive) force (Hanson) roaming the earth and occasionally trying to do the right thing, but mostly just trying to scrape by without killing anyone (or anyone he shouldn't). Beneath the surface of the prose, there's an unhinged core that radiates from every page. In a scene from Night Dogs, Hanson stops by a college party in his off-duty capacity. Shortly after arriving, he quietly sips a beer and considers killing everyone in the room—social anxiety and alienation bubbling into toxicity, a reflection of the horror he saw overseas—before banishing the thought and seeking out the girl he came to see. Violence is always present, or its shadow, and death is never too far behind. In Green Sun, Hanson's hallucinations seem to become more literal as he occasionally looks up to see Death watching him, a random passerby in a leather jacket, maybe the black rabbit bouncing through the trash-littered streets of 1983 Oakland, or just a simmering presence somewhere in the background.

Reading Anderson, I get echoes of Hubert Selby, Jr. and Iceberg Slim, writers who probably lived the lives they write about, who saw things no one should, and who don't flinch in the retelling. Anderson rarely focuses on plot; rather, he gives us a string of daily vignettes, repetition reflecting the beat of the beat cop, themes resurfacing and unfurling across a few hundred pages. Anderson focuses on the details without lingering, letting us breathe in the landscape as we settle into Hanson's bones and start to see the world as he does, where the streets of Portland, OR, and Oakland, CA, are drug-addled and blasted, haunted by the living dead (junkies), roaming beasts (bikers, gangsters, schizoids), and an occupying force stretched too thin (police). That tension often triggers flashbacks to the actual war, and more often than not it makes Hanson (and the reader at home, whew) reach for a stiff drink.

Green Sun departs from its predecessors slightly. It feels slightly hopeful. Escape may be possible after all, peace more than a fleeting dream. We see Hanson against a backdrop of falling snow more than once, and it seems to calm him—and us with it, as those of us following from the start have been to the brink and back by now. Hanson's personal apocalypse feels somewhat tempered by age—he's 38 now, rather than the fire-eyed kid from Sympathy for the Devil or the mid-20s maniac from Night Dogs—and that need for calm and quiet, for something good, rubs away some of his sharper edges. That said, Green Sun lacks some of the razor's edge urgency that made Night Dogs such a harrowing experience, though it's almost as affecting. It's a book about an aging cop, about police work, communities and their citizens, crime, low-living, cycles of violence, life and death.

To anyone approaching Anderson's work for the first time, if the nihilistic darkness of the earlier books sounds appealing, I would read them in order (recognizing that Night Dogs is both his darkest and sharpest achievement). Otherwise, the later books hardly spoil the earlier ones, so just start where it's convenient. I read all three across a span of five months, and Green Sun only felt slightly diminished by the long shadow of its predecessors, which are shockingly good, and both in my growing list of personal favorites. It's an excellent book on its own that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend.

Kent Anderson’s first novel in more than twenty years sparkles darkly, like California iron sands shimmering under the baking heat of a midsummer sun; gorgeous yet dangerously hot to the touch. It’s mesmerizing, violent and thought-provoking, full of flashes of brutality yet beautifully written.

Green Sun belatedly continues the travails of Hanson, who readers first met in Sympathy for the Devil (1987) as a poetry-loving college student turned Green Beret who found the savagery within himself to survive the horrors of Vietnam. Hanson returned a decade later in Night Dogs, a powerful tale of the dangerous, complex realities of life on the beat in the Portland PD. Now Hanson, like his creator himself, has leapt from Vietnam to Oregon cop to college life then back to the beat with the Oakland PD. He’s a thirty-eight-year-old at the Oakland police academy then out on streets that can resemble a war zone, trying to survive and get his months in. Some colleagues, as well as criminals, may be gunning for him.

Anderson tells his tale as a series of vignettes, slices of life for an unusual street cop in early 1980s Oakland. There’s not so much a central storyline to Green Sun as there is an accumulation of experiences that give us a startlingly raw look at the realities of cop life at that time and place. There’s a gritty authenticity rising to the surface among the spare beauty of Anderson’s prose. Hanson is an unusual, unforgettable character that’s easy to follow even as events and choices get sharp. A social worker with a gun, more interested in justice than arrest counts and overtime pay.

A searing insight into life on the streets, from a master storyteller.

Officer Hanson walking the beat, hitting the street with no fear of dying, surviving Vietnam back from being from one danger zone to another in Oakland, and with death passing him he making his way up the ropes to get his certificate, so that he can be a chief, a deputy of some place, a year on the street thats all he wanted to get his POST certificate: Peace Officer Standards and Training.
The author evokes with great craft all that unfolds in the main protagonist Hanson's days on the streets, his clocking in and out and trying to make enough arrests to fill his arrest quota every month. This guy is likeable, the hook in the narrative is will he see it through alive, in the narrative he believes he cannot be killed since surviving war. He brushes with various characters that may just put him up to the test, the likes of one Felix Maxwell, Oakland’s major dope dealer, who drives a Rolls-Royce and is a killer to boot, all plays out within the shoes of a character from that show and true narrative the Wire. He has offers made to him from many, from love to hush money, with some possible love interest in the wings and possibly promotion or he just saving general public from harm. As a legit man caring for people he has the reader empathically reading on in his endeavours, conflicts, and dogging bullets.
The writing is top notch here, the author has a keen eye for putting you there in the scene, a time of no cctv and just before first mobiles came on to the seen, in and out on the beat becoming alive and intriguing upon the page. Officer Hanson, despite his flaws who has an ability if needed to carry out killing with precision and unflinching swiftness but chooses most times to talk people out of trouble into custody and always use gun last unless except the situation needed it, his enforcing law comes with heart, conscious, and smarts, some would hate him and some like him.
The author a veteran of war and an ex-cop has written what he knows with clarity and some good writing, social commentary, and heart in the details.

At thirty-eight years old, Hanson finds himself the oldest cadet in the Oakland, California, Police Academy. He was a police officer in Portland for four years-a good one, he thought-before quitting to try teaching at a college in Idaho. That didn't work out, so he went to Oakland, hired sight unseen by a Lieutenant who had departed the agency before Hanson even arrived, leaving him at the mercy of a department that opposed his hiring and would do what he could to rid the Oakland PD of the old recruit. But Hanson is not a quitter.
GREEN SUN is the third novel by Kent Anderson about Hanson following SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL and NIGHT DOGS. It starts at the end of his teaching career in Idaho and follows him through the Oakland Police Academy and about a year as a patrol officer. Despite his antipathy for police work and the people he works with, he takes the job seriously and does his best to do it fairly, usually avoid violence, and get through his eighteen months to earn his Peace Officer Standards & Training (POST) Certificate, so he can move on to another department.
"A place where…he'd be the law, an armed social worker enforcing the social contract of that particular jurisdiction. Where justice would be more important that the California Penal Code…and hell, do it without a gun…He didn't need a gun, only morons needed a gun."
Hanson struggles every day with his job: the quotas, violence, and ulterior motives of his peers and supervisors.
"But he was an asshole, he thought. Didn't matter, just another asshole cop. Pretty soon he'd fit right in, one of the guys finally. If he'd start arresting everybody he could, pile up citations and kiss enough ass, he might make sergeant someday, or get on a special drug squad with the special assholes."
Hanson doesn't want to be the asshole he thought was becoming but was not perfect. He makes arrests to keep the brass off his back, nearly succumbs to seduction, uses force, befriends a drug dealer, and is no stranger to drugs and alcohol abuse himself. He sometimes feels as if he's already dead, and therefore does not fear death, knowing it's inevitable, even while finding peace with a woman and hope in a young man he befriends in his neighborhood.
GREEN SUN has an abstract feel to it, Hanson being disconnected from much of the world and himself, in a state between life and death. Some chapters read like short stories, establishing Hanson as a character and police officer, giving the reader a look at policing in the 1980s, but not otherwise moving the plot forward. In some ways, those are the chapters I enjoyed the most and found most relatable.
GREEN SUN offers a vivid look into the failures of policing of the 1980s through the eyes of an imperfect but hopeful character. Set solidly in the era of the establishment of professional policing--"…standardize cops, crank them out and deploy them as interchangeable cop units." --that measured the successes in numbers of arrests and other data while minimizing the value of community policing while solidifying what became the drug war as we know it. The remnants of both of those arguably failed approaches are still being combatted today.

This is one of the finest books ever written about what it means to be a cop and a veteran. In a multi-layered depiction of one man's efforts to stay sane and do his job, Anderson, calling on his own experience, creates a masterful work of art. This is a rich and heady stew that I found utterly compelling in its interweaving of quotidian reality and dream-like sequences of magical realism. Just like Hanson, the main character, the reader is never sure what is real and what is dreamed. Is he awake when asleep or vice-versa? Is his paranoia real or imagined? To me this is an American masterpiece and It is the best book I have read in years.