Okay, so my Dennis Lehane kick wasn’t so intense as I thought it was. Still I like his writing, and I will likely finish the rest of his Kenzie/Gennaro novels before the year is over.

Darkness, Take My Hand is the second book in that series. Here, Patrick Kenzie is lured into protecting the son of a psychiatrist. She’s received a threat against his life by someone claiming to be Moira Kenzie and blaming two local mafioso. Kenzie (Patrick, that is) determines quickly that Moira Kenzie faked the name and that the mafioso weren’t behind it. In fact, no one seems to be behind it. So after a few weeks of tailing the son, Kenzie and Gennaro quit and move on to other cases.

Kara Rider, a few years younger than Kenzie is found murdered. Crucified in fact. And Kenzie is drawn in to the case. Soon, the son of the psychiatrist is really found dead, by the same killer. More and more people are threatened and killed. There’s a serial killer on the loose. Two in fact, working in tandem, and they have something against the crew Kenzie ran with as a teen, picking off them or their children.

So, I didn’t like this one as much as the other Kenzie/Gennaro novels I’ve already read. The plot in this one is just too convoluted. I don’t have a problem with a psychopath targeting people he feels have done him wrong. This was just too elaborate to work though. And the police took far too long to piece together the connections. Oh sure, everyone held back secrets and that’s what kept them from figuring it out. And there’s a little too much cowboying that goes wrong too. These folks should know better than to do things without backup, licit or illicit. Yet at key points they keep running off on their own, giving the bad guys the opportunity to mess with them. And why they keep messing with them instead of just exacting revenge I don’t know. They are supposedly smart and yet they do some obviously stupid things like leave messages and then hang around to see what happens when the messages are received. Bleah.

Still, it’s a good page-turner. I can overlook the flaws because none of them were so bad as to make me groan.

Title: Darkness, take my hand
Author: Dennis Lehane
Imprint/Publisher: HarperTorch / HarperCollinsPublishers
Publication date: 1996
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 355 p.
ISBN-10: 0-380-72628-9
Subject: Kenzie, Patrick (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Gennaro, Angela (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Private investigators — Massachusetts — Boston — Fiction
Subject: Boston (Mass.) — Fiction
LC Classification: PS3562.E426 D37 1996

In addition to being on a John Allen Paulos kick lately, I am also on a Dennis Lehane kick. I stopped in at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop (you should too, one of the best bookstores in existence) and stocked up on all the Lehane books I didn’t already own in paperback. So watch for reviews of the three books of his I haven’t yet read in the coming weeks.

A Drink Before the War is the first book starring Patrick Kenzie and Angeline Gennaro. They are private investigators in Boston who find people. In this case, a powerful state senator hires them to find the cleaning lady for one of his lackey senators. Seems she quit, disappeared on the same day certain photographs of the lackey senator (in a compromising position) also went missing. They assume she has them. So they want Kenzie and Gennaro to find her. Well, actually, they couldn’t care less about the cleaning lady. They just want the photographs. No photographs, no blackmail and no scandal. And they can then continue on their normal course of graft.

Now, why the cleaning lady Jenna Angeline, took the photographs is pretty quickly obvious. Kenzie finds her, but she talks him into not reporting back to the Senator so she can show Kenzie what she has on him. She hands over to him a photograph of the senator with a young boy, but also recognizable in the photograph is her ex-husband. He’s a gang boss and pimp. It’s the one coincidence in the book. Normally, I hate when mysteries are built on lots of coincidences, but Lehane generally does a good job of not building his stories on coincidence. This one is built entirely on coincidence, but it’s not a totally outrageous one. Shortly after turning over that one photograph to Kenzie, her ex, the gang boss known as Socia, has her killed and Kenzie is there to witness it. He doesn’t want to be implicated either.

However, the bulk of the photographs have yet to be recovered so Kenzie and Gennaro have to find those as well. Unfortunately, this puts him right smack in the middle of a gang war. Socia’s son Roland has his own rival gang, and he doesn’t seem too happy that his mother has been killed. Father vs. son, both of whom are gunning for Kenzie and Gennaro.

Again (or first, rather, since this is the first book from the author), Lehane pounds two themes into his readers. Crimes against children and their consequences. And somewhat related, his heroes have more than feet of clay. They have mean streaks and are more than willing to cut corners as well as generally do things for which god will send them to hell. For instance, in an incident prior to the story but described in a flashback, Kenzie beats the crap out of Gennaro’s asshole husband, who took it out on Gennaro after his release from the hospital. This scene is used to explain why Kenzie does nothing when Gennaro shows up for work with a black eye courtesy of said asshole husband.

The book is extremely engrossing and readable. Don’t read it though if you are sensitive to graphic violence or crimes against children.

Title: A drink before the war
Author: Dennis Lehane
Series: Kenzie-Gennaro book 1
Imprint / publisher: HarperTorch / HarperCollins
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 277 p.
Publication date: December 2000
ISBN-10: 0-380-72623-8
Subject: Kenzie, Patrick (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Gennaro, Angela (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Private investigators — Massachusetts — Boston — Fiction
Subject: Family violence — Fiction
Subject: Boston (Mass.) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3562.E426 D75 1994

Gone, Baby, Gone is the third Dennis Lehane book I’ve read. I’ve previously read Mystic River and loved it and Shutter Island and thought it was okay. I reposted the Mystic River review but I can’t find where I reviewed Shutter Island anywhere. Too bad.

Continuing his theme of writing about children as well as about less than perfect characters, Gone, Baby, Gone stars Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro (who I believe appear in other Lehane books as well). They are private investigators who are hired to find Amanda McReady who has been abducted. She’s a small child with a neglectful drug addict for a mother. Soon they find out that not only had Helene McReady abandoned the child for 10+ hours to drink at a bar, she had recently helped rip off Sven Cheese Olamon the local drug lord of $200,000. Revenge for the theft puts Cheese at the top of the list of suspects. But it gets a lot more complicated when an exchange of the $200,000 for Amanda McReady goes horribly wrong; Kenzie and Gennaro are shot at and pinned down in a quarry, while the pick-up men for Cheese are found dead in a car. Who did the shooting and how they got away become the mystery. The next day Cheese is found dead in the prison where he serves time and runs the drug trade.

In the whole book, there’s really only two characters who are typical good people. Beatrice McReady, the aunt who hires Kenzie and Gennaro, and Amanda McReady herself. Together they get very little screen time. Kenzie and Gennaro have killed people in cold blood in the past. Cheese is a fairly upright guy on the other side. Helene McReady of course is a nearly worthless mother. The two cops on the case, Nick Raftopoulos and Remy Broussard show a complete willingness to break the rules, skipping search warrants for instance.

The looming question throughout the book is that of returning Amanda McReady to her mother Helene, who is a worthless mother. While she is in the hands of kidnappers, she’s certainly likely to be killed. But should she be returned to her mother if she’s found?

The plot is pretty complicated, but at least it doesn’t rely too much on coincidence. Still, there are a couple of huge plot holes that bothered me. One is that Cheese, after the failed exchange, has every reason to spill the beans of what he knows. He doesn’t, because he’s afraid of the real bad guy. Yet when the story ends, I realized Cheese had little to lose from the bad guys who left his two pick up men dead at the scene. Plus, there are a couple of other pivot points that require the cooperation of people who really could enhance their own prospects if they do not cooperate. I think that’s all a side effect of a complicate story.

Title: Gone, baby, gone
Author: Dennis Lehane
Series: Kenzie-Gennaro book 4
Imprint / publisher: HarperTorch / HarperCollins
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 412 p.
Publication date: February 2001
ISBN-10: 0-380-73035-9
Subject: Kenzie, Patrick (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Gennaro, Angela (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Private investigators — Massachusetts — Boston — Fiction
Subject: Children — Crimes against — Fiction
Subject: Boston (Mass.) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3562.E426 G66 1998