Take a photo of a barcode or cover
4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
Quite simply one of the best books I have ever read, EVER.
In the end, this book all boils down to, without having to spoil anything: are you Team Kenzie or are you Team Gennaro? I'm Team Gennaro all the way, absolutely. I'm like Remy on top of that building, "I just love children."
This is a hard book to read. It's hard to read as a parent & especially hard to read over a weekend where the news in my city is all about a little girl from Broomfield who has been missing for several days. I can feel in my bones & in my chest & my stomach how hard that must hurt & it scares me to death. That I was able to keep on reading this book afterwhat happens to Samuel, which kind of made me want to throw up is a testament to how much I liked it. I've come to expect a lame twist at the end of Lehane's novels, but while there's a certified twist here, it's actually pretty cool.
This is a hard book to read. It's hard to read as a parent & especially hard to read over a weekend where the news in my city is all about a little girl from Broomfield who has been missing for several days. I can feel in my bones & in my chest & my stomach how hard that must hurt & it scares me to death. That I was able to keep on reading this book after
Compelling story from the first scene, told by a likable easygoing detective. Though the vast assortment of characters and subplots can be trying to follow at times, the pacing is perfect and details just pertinent & interesting enough to keep the rhythm flowing. Beautifully confronts the questions of how do we fairly assess character & motive and who deserves to be parents.
The search for more writers in the hard-boiled detective genre continues, and Lehane can be added to the list. There’s nothing more pleasurable than a cynical, wise-cracking detective. For example, Boston private eyes Patrick McKenzie and partner Angela Gennaro become involved in a child disappearance case. The mother, Helene, is a sleaze, more interested in watching Jerry Springer and the soaps and getting herself on TV than in caring for her child, and the two detectives soon discover the little girl has become a pawn in a kidnapping for ransom – Helene had been involved in the theft of $200,000 from a drug czar who wants his money back. Boston has a neighborhood called Charleston that was the original Boston site, but it was soon abandoned after the Pilgrims discovered the water to be inexplicably brackish. They crossed the narrow channel taking the Boston name with them. Those who live there now have been historically reluctant to deal with authorities; it’s home to many generations of dockworkers, fishermen and merchant mariners. “This adherence to keeping one’s mouth shut even extends to simple directions. Ask a townie how to get to such-and-such street and his eyes will narrow. ‘The F__k you doing here if you don’t know where you’re going?’ might be the polite response, followed by an extended middle finger if he really likes you.” Is the precise way Lehane describes the difficulty of an investigation in Charleston. I love it. The kidnapping evolves into an infuriating sequence of events, and none of them seems to make sense to the detectives. The mother of the child had apparently been involved with drug-dealers, and the child was being held in exchange for money the mother had stolen. Someone murders the drug dealers during the supposed exchange for the money and one of them, we learn, may have been a DEA agent. The ending resolves into a moral conundrum for the two detectives that breaks up their partnership. Rogue policemen had instigated a scheme to save abused children by stealing them and placing them into good homes, completely bypassing the system, and this case revealed the layers of secrecy that surrounded their plan.
This book pretty much destroyed me. I've worked with a lot of neglected kids over the years so it really hit home. Lehane is definitely one of those writers who some people peg as not being particularly good because of the genre he writes in but when he's on, he is ON. Vivid characters and settings. I like all the books in this series, but this was easily my favorite. For the record, the movie based on this books is also really good.
With the latter three titles in the Kenzie-Gennarro mysteries, Lehane really begins to cook, and this, the fourth, is probably my favorite. Alas, it is being made into a movie with Ben Affleck in the lead. Damn.
Another brutal Kenzie and Gennaro book. Meatier than the last one and heartbreakingly brutal for all involved. I hate to see where Patrick and Angie end up at the end of this one and I'm glad it's not the end of their story.
Dennis Lehane, Gone, Baby, Gone (Morrow, 1998)
Lehane clocks in with the fourth novel in the Kenzie and Gennaro series with his most intricate plot and satisfying novel so far. In this one, Kenzie and Gennaro are bullied into taking the case of a missing four-year-old by the girl's aunt. The mother seems not to care much about her child's whereabouts when she's not in front of the TV cameras, preferring to watch television and drink beer with her best friend and next door neighbor. What's already an atypical missing persons case gets weirder and weirder as Kenzie and Gennaro, working with a couple of Boston cops named Poole and Broussard, peel off layer after layer that links the case to organized crime, drug dealing, a two-hundred-thousand dollar heist, and imprisoned renegade mob boss Cheese Olamon, a schoolyard acquaintance of Kenzie's.
While the moralizing of [b:A Drink Before the War|21685|A Drink Before the War|Dennis Lehane|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167322952s/21685.jpg|22786] is back (though far more subdued here) and Lehane seems to buy into the urban myth of the ever-present Child Molester on Every Corner, such concerns for the intent of the author tend to fall by the wayside when a mystery is so intricately plotted. Red herrings fly thick and fast, the case twists and turns with startling frequency, no one is in any way happy, and ghosts of old cases the two have worked return to haunt them with regularity as they bump heads over and over again with higher-ups in the Boston and state police departments. It is the skill with which the mystery is plotted, and Lehane's affable writing style, that keeps this book from falling into the one-trick-pony trap of a Jonathan Kellerman or an Andrew Vachss. Lehane finally made a solid name for himself with the success of Mystic River two years ago; here's to hoping fans of that novel will come back and discover the Kenzie and Gennaro novels, some of the best neo-noir writing there is to be had today. ****
Lehane clocks in with the fourth novel in the Kenzie and Gennaro series with his most intricate plot and satisfying novel so far. In this one, Kenzie and Gennaro are bullied into taking the case of a missing four-year-old by the girl's aunt. The mother seems not to care much about her child's whereabouts when she's not in front of the TV cameras, preferring to watch television and drink beer with her best friend and next door neighbor. What's already an atypical missing persons case gets weirder and weirder as Kenzie and Gennaro, working with a couple of Boston cops named Poole and Broussard, peel off layer after layer that links the case to organized crime, drug dealing, a two-hundred-thousand dollar heist, and imprisoned renegade mob boss Cheese Olamon, a schoolyard acquaintance of Kenzie's.
While the moralizing of [b:A Drink Before the War|21685|A Drink Before the War|Dennis Lehane|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167322952s/21685.jpg|22786] is back (though far more subdued here) and Lehane seems to buy into the urban myth of the ever-present Child Molester on Every Corner, such concerns for the intent of the author tend to fall by the wayside when a mystery is so intricately plotted. Red herrings fly thick and fast, the case twists and turns with startling frequency, no one is in any way happy, and ghosts of old cases the two have worked return to haunt them with regularity as they bump heads over and over again with higher-ups in the Boston and state police departments. It is the skill with which the mystery is plotted, and Lehane's affable writing style, that keeps this book from falling into the one-trick-pony trap of a Jonathan Kellerman or an Andrew Vachss. Lehane finally made a solid name for himself with the success of Mystic River two years ago; here's to hoping fans of that novel will come back and discover the Kenzie and Gennaro novels, some of the best neo-noir writing there is to be had today. ****
A good fast-paced mystery with lots of action and twists and turns, it kept me up past my bed-time. Lehane spends a little more time than the average mystery writer on the setting effectively--you can picture the bars, houses and quarries. But I don't buy the premise on this one.