The tough neighborhood of Dorchester is no place for the innocent or the weak. A territory defined by hard heads and even harder luck, its streets are littered with the detritus of broken families, hearts, dreams. Now, one of its youngest is missing. Private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro don't want the case. But after pleas from the child's aunt, they open an investigation that will ultimately risk everything—their relationship, their sanity, and even their lives—to find a little girl lost.
Amazon.com Review: Cheese Olamon, "a six-foot-two, four-hundred-and-thirty-pound yellow-haired Scandinavian who'd somehow arrived at the misconception he was black," is telling his old grammar school friends Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro why they have to convince another mutual chum, the gun dealer Bubba Rugowski, that Cheese didn't try to have him killed. "You let Bubba know I'm clean when it comes to what happened to him. You want me alive. Okay? Without me, that girl will be gone. Gone-gone. You understand? Gone, baby, gone." Of all the chilling, completely credible scenes of sadness, destruction, and betrayal in Dennis Lehane's fourth and very possibly best book about Kenzie and Gennaro, this moment stands out because it captures in a few pages the essence of Lehane's success.
Private detectives Kenzie and Gennaro, who live in the same working-class Dorchester neighborhood of Boston where they grew up, have gone to visit drug dealer Cheese in prison because they think he's involved in the kidnapping of 4-year-old Amanda McCready. Without sentimentalizing the grotesque figure of Cheese, Lehane tells us enough about his past to make us understand why he and the two detectives might share enough trust to possibly save a child's life when all the best efforts of traditional law enforcement have failed. By putting Kenzie and Gennaro just to one side of the law (but not totally outside; they have several cop friends, a very important part of the story), Lehane adds depth and edge to traditional genre relationships. The lifelong love affair between Kenzie and Gennaro--interrupted by her marriage to his best friend--is another perfectly controlled element that grows and changes as we watch. Surrounded by dead, abused, and missing children, Kenzie mourns and rages while Gennaro longs for one of her own. So the choices made by both of them in the final pages of this absolutely gripping story have the inevitability of life and the dazzling beauty of art.
Other Kenzie/Gennaro books available in paperback: Darkness, Take My Hand, A Drink Before the War, Sacred. --Dick Adler
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - excellent series
Just what I needed: a book with minimal romance, no historical setting, and Lehane's wonderful way with words.
A missing child pulls Patrick and Angie into a dark, intense story full of suspense and intrigue, with personal complications for them.
There's a fascinating cast of characters--all drawn in varying shades of gray, as well as a clever and chilling mystery.
And the series is as much about Patrick & Angie as it is about the cases.
Rating: - As they say in Spanish,
what's one more spot to a tiger? Anyway ... .
If this book wasn't in a genre that in the end saturated me, I would give it five stars.
The style is good (perhaps a weeny little macho-stereotyped), the moral problem posed is genuine and deep, as a mistery i'ts OK, and nowhere does the pace slow down.
Read it if you can. It's one of the best. Better, I think, than most Scandinavians (and US, it goes without saying) ones.
Rating: - Absolutely engrossing!!
I had a hard time putting down this book. It raised moral and ethical issues all wrapped up in a tale of mystery and suspense.
The surrounds the disappearance of a four year old who belongs to a worthless mother. What has become of her? Is she dead or alive.
The answers to these questions are answered in the final parts of the book, but the ethical and morality issues dealt with remains with the reader forever.
Rating: - Moral Questions
This book genuinely surprised me. It took a while to catch my interest at first, but it was good enough to keep me reading. The last fifty pages, though, were absolutely gut-wrenching, in the way you want a book to be gut-wrenching. The characters are faced with a huge moral dilemma, where there is no easy answer, no option that seems palpable, but a decision must be made. Action must be taken. And the rest of their lives, the characters are left to wonder if they did the right thing. And ...more ... Read More
Rating: - Good writing but it does require suspension of belief
I find it difficult to digest that the police cop and the criminals staked out Amanda's house at the same time.
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