Vanished, in this complex and unsettling fourth case for PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro (after Sacred, 1997) is four-year-old Amanda McCready, taken one night from her apartment in Dorchester, a working-class section of Boston, where her mother had left her alone. Kenzie and Gennaro, hired by the child's aunt and uncle, join in an unlikely alliance with Remy Broussard and Nick Raftopoulos, known as Poole, the two cops with the department's Crimes Against Children squad who are assigned to the case. In tracing the history of Amanda's neglectful mother, whose past involved her with a drug lord and his minions, the foursome quickly find themselves tangling with Boston's crime underworld and involved in what appears to be a coup among criminals. Lehane develops plenty of tension between various pairs of parties: the good guys looking for Amanda and the bad guys who may know where she is; the two PIs and the two cops; various police and federal agencies; opposing camps in the underworld; and Patrick and Angie, who are lovers as well as business partners. All is delivered with abundant violence--e.g., bloated and mutilated corpses; gangland executions; shoot-outs with weapons of prodigious firepower; descriptions of sexual abuse of small children; threats of rape and murder--that serves to make Amanda's likely fate all the more chilling. Lehane tackles corruption in many forms as he brings his complicated plot to its satisfying resolution, at the same time leaving readers to ponder moral questions about social and individual responsibility long after the last page is turned.
Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island, as well as writer for The Wire and Boardwalk Empire, dropped by the Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side in Manhattan on Tuesday, March 10. He opened by saying, “it’s raining, and you came out for me. I would not have come out for […]
Each month we ask a panel of our bloggers to suggest a book based on what they’re reading right now. Here’s what we think you should read this month! Joel: Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo and the Battle that Defined a Generation, by Blake J. Harris A must-read historical narrative for any ’90s kid who still bears […]
Fans of author Dennis Lehane know that his novels are smart, sharp page-turners. They’re thickly plotted, laced with violence, and frequently populated with working-class characters living lives of quiet desperation in and around Boston. And, as any movie buff can tell you, they are particularly well suited to great film adaptations (see: the brilliant, melancholy Mystic River […]
Mother’s Day is upon us—what better time to look at The Worst Mothers of Crime Fiction? If you’d like to get all passive-aggressive in your Mother’s Day gift-giving this year, consider the following books and DVDs: