Product Description

Kenzie and Gennaro have been hired to find four-year-old Amanda McCready, abducted from her home without leaving a trace. Despite extensive news coverage and dogged investigation, the police inquiry has so far uncovered nothing. The case is rife with oddities: Amanda's strangely indifferent mother and her dangerous, drug-addled friends; her loving aunt and uncle; and two cops who have found so many abused or dead children they may already be over the edge. As the Indian summer fades, Amanda McCready stays gone - banished so completely that she seems never to have existed. And when a second child disappears, Kenzie and Gennaro face a local media more interested in sensationalizing the abductions than helping to solve them, a police force seething with lethal secrets, and a faceless power determined to obstruct their efforts. Caught in a deadly tangle of lies and betrayal, they must confront the horror of what the world can inflict on its children in order to unravel a riddle that's anything but child's play.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #828184 in Books
• Published on: 1998-12-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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 old high school friends, Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, why they have to convince another mutual chum, dealer Bubba Rugowski, that Cheese didn't try to have him killed. "You 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 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 still live in the same working-class Dorchester neighbourhood of Boston, Massachusetts, where they grew up, have gone to visit drug dealer Cheese in prison because they think he's involved the kidnapping of 4-year-old Amanda McCready. Without sentimentalising 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 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 love affair between Kenzie and Gennaro--interrupted by her marriage to his friend--is another perfectly controlled element that grows and changes as we watch. Surrounded by dead, abused and missing children, Kenzie mourns and rages; Gennaro longs for one of her own. 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 are: Darkness, Take My Hand, A Drink Before the War, Sacred. -- Dick Adler

From the Back Cover
Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to find four-year-old Amanda McCready.

Despite extensive news coverage and dogged investigation into her abduction, the police have uncovered nothing. The case is rife with oddities: Amanda’s indifferent mother, a couple with a history of paedophilia and a shadowy police unit. As the Indian summer fades, Amanda McCready stays gone – vanished so completely that she seems never to have existed.

When a second child disappears, Kenzie and Gennaro face a local media more interested in sensationalizing the abductions than helping to solve them, a local police force seething with lethal secrets, and a faceless power determined to obstruct their efforts. Caught in a deadly tangle of lies, and determined to unravel the riddle that is anything but child’s play, they soon discover that those who go looking for the missing may not come back alive.

About the Author
Dennis Lehane is the author of A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR (which won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel); DARKNESS, TAKE MY HAND; SACRED; GONE, BABY, GONE; PRAYERS FOR RAIN; SHUTTER ISLAND and the NEW YORK TIMES bestseller MYSTIC RIVER. A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, he lives in the Boston area.

Customer Reviews

"What crime had we committed in the woods of West Becket?"
Investigating the kidnapping of four-year-old Amanda McCready, daughter of a neglectful single mother/druggie/barfly in Dorchester, Massachusetts, private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro get caught up in one of their most challenging cases. The fourth in the Kenzie/Gennaro series by Lehane, this case is not "just" a kidnapping on their home turf. The pair also investigates Cheese Olamon, a Scandinavian giant they knew when they were growing up--now a drug dealer with serious underworld connections, a convict and enforcer. Amanda's mother has been involved with Olamon and may have lucked into a $200,000 payoff meant for him, within moments of Cheese's arrest and incarceration. No one knows what happened to the money or whether it is related to the kidnapping of Amanda.

Investigators Kenzie and Gennaro, who live together, become emotionally involved in this wrenching case, tracking down clues that suggest that Amanda is dead. They are also forced to deal with renegade members of the Boston Police, who do their own enforcing, which is faster and easier than dealing with the justice system. Some of these renegades have their own secrets to hide, and Kenzie and Gennaro soon prove to be dangerous to them. Meetings in the woods at night, shootouts, executions, crosses and double-crosses leave Kenzie and Gennaro no closer to finding Amanda, and time is running out.

Always adept at creating characters, Lehane creates new conflicts here between Kenzie and Gennaro as they deal with their discoveries and try to agree on their actions. Do they follow the book, or do they do what is "just"? Can they even agree on what justice is? Throughout the novel, their past relationships with people from Dorchester whom they have known all their lives provide additional complications, at the same time that they create great reader identification as the two private investigators operate in their home neighborhood. As characters, one by one, meet their deaths, the tensions and sense of forboding rise, until Kenzie and Gennaro are close to the breaking point, both personally and as a couple.

Combining snappy and realistic dialogue with outstanding description, Lehane shows Kenzie and Gennaro dealing with people who live on the fringes, those who do whatever it takes to get by and never second guess their choices. Often as violent as the criminals and police with whom they are engaged, Kenzie and Gennaro face crises here which test their relationship, endanger their lives, and force them to decide what is right--one of their best cases.

Brilliantly written - pure class
Gennaro and Kenzie are yet again on a multi-faceted trail involving some of the most disturbing sides of humanity. This time we are on the trail of a missing child, lost drug money; all disappearing in to thin air. Although there are references to other books - the forward pace of the storyline is maintained throughout. I love Bubba (wouldn't want to be on his wrong side though!) and Lehane manages to weave deep emotions throughout; in fact, this one made me cry. If you've never read Lehane before, buy this one, read it, and they buy the rest. You won't regret it.
Hope he doesn't take too long writing the next one.

Awe Inspiring
I cried when I read parts of this. I think a key part of Lehane's writing abilities are how the characters are human - flawed and realistic. Even the good guys have off days or less than noble thoughts - and the bad guys occasionally surpise you with deeds that you'd expect too noble for them. And as for Bubba - he's in a class of his own. Read all of these books - he deserves to be a star in the UK.