Gone, Baby, Gone (Harper Fiction)
by Dennis Lehane
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Book Summary Information
Author: Dennis LehaneEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-25
ISBN: 0061374199
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Harper
Book Reviews of Gone, Baby, Gone (Harper Fiction)
Book Review: An enthralling, complex, human thriller.
Summary: 5 Stars
Four-year-old Amanda McCready has vanished. Amanda's mother Helene isn't the best of parents; it's Helene's brother and his wife who hire Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. But finding the girl won't be easy, if it's even possible at all. All it does is draw Patrick and Angie deeper into the seediest sections of Boston, where no one (literally no one) is to be trusted, and the human condition is put to the test.
GONE, BABY, GONE is easily one of the better entries in Lehane's Kenzie/Gennaro series (which is saying something, since the series itself is spectacular). Lehane writes with an eye for human frailty, for the flaws that make us good or evil. No one is perfect, not even our beloved protagonists. GONE, BABY, GONE is fraught with characters both good and evil (though none who are 100% either way), caught up in the web of someone else's deceit.
Doubtless many readers are coming to this book through the film (as I did; GONE, BABY, GONE; MYSTIC RIVER; and the up-coming SHUTTER ISLAND turned me on to Lehane's novels, and I haven't looked back since). Therefore, I must make a comparison, though it's not an easy one to make. The film trims off the novel's fat, changes a few things around to make it more streamline; in many ways, the film surpasses the novel. It's more suspenseful, more powerful in spots. And yet, Lehane's novel is so wonderful BECAUSE of the excess. It's easily a hundred pages too long, not that anyone's complaining; Lehane's dialogue and prose is so vivid, his sense of character so realistic, that the novel never seems excessive. If you liked the film, odds are you'll like the novel; if you like the novel, odds are you'll like the film. Both excel in their respective media. Either way, it's safe to say that Dennis Lehane's GONE, BABY, GONE is easily one of the best modern detective novels out there.
Summary of Gone, Baby, Gone (Harper Fiction)
The tough neighborhood of Dorchester is no place for the innocent or the weak. Its territory is 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.
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
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