Well, I am starting out
another year of books with a welcome bang, reading a book that one of my
favorite authors, Dennis Lehane, is famous for, Gone Baby Gone. Before he
turned to writing books like Mystic river and The Given Day, Lehane wrote four
novels centered on private detectives, Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro in the
Boston. I was very excited to read this book, thinking it would be a lot of the
elements I liked in his other novels heightened and made the focus of the
story, and I am glad to say that it did just that, and like the other books of
Lehane, I loved it dearly. Whether it is his knack for writing speech that
leaves you in stitches but also cuts deep to harsh truths about the modern
world, or his unpretentious ways of handling story and character, he really is
one of the best writers alive today, not just of crime novels, but of novels
that dissect and examine the darkest parts of our hearts, hoping and praying to
come upon any kind of light. And he performs his humanistic duty without sacrificing
the pulse of the narrative. Rarely is their a boring moment in any of his
stories, and even in the slow moments, when the guns have stopped firing and
the screaming has stopped, he still has the reader’s full attention, waiting
for some truth or unspoken feeling to come from from a character on the edge of
life itself. The story begins with the disappearance of four-year-old Amanda
Mcready from the home of her disgustingly neglectful mother, Helene. Pressured
into a job they do not want to take, on account of the possibility of a
horrific outcome for Amanda, Kenzie and Gennaro approach the crime with
trepidation and maybe perhaps a little too much vigor and aggression toward
possible suspects. We go with them on their journey through the dark underbelly
of Boston, past the robbers, killers and even the rapists, to the truly evil
people that call this world home, leading to a shocking conclusion that brings
into question whether the right thing is always the right thing for everyone.
This is probably the darkest Lehane has ever gotten in terms of story and
definitely in terms of subject matter, even more so than he did with Mystic River
and Shutter Island. A scene towards the end where which eventually drives all
involved in the case of Amanda to the breaking point of rage and misanthropy is
easily the most disturbing thing Lehane has written and is sometimes hard to
fathom, but never do we get a sense that it always has to be this way. These
terrible things happen out of human weakness, but those same weaknesses play to
our strengths, and can lead the lonely and the damned in life on the road to
becoming better people. It really is an awesome experience to read a novel by Dennis
Lehane, and this is a really good place to start.
Rating: 5/5
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