Will Byrnes's Reviews > Moonlight Mile

Dennis Lehane returns to the world of Boston PIs Patrick Kenzie and his partner, now wife, Angie Gennaro. He returns also to themes of parents and children that informed the five-book series Lehane produced in the 1990s. In Moonlight Mile, Patrick and Angie are themselves parents. Patrick is still working as a PI, struggling with some moral conflicts in his assignments from a prestigious law firm, while Angie is trying to find some sanity in non-life-threatening work. But when the aunt of a child he had recovered in the book Gone, Baby, Gone, turns up and asks Patrick to find her missing niece, now 16, one more time, we are back in familiar territory.

It may be 11 years since the last Kenzie-Gennaro outing, but it feels like it was only last year. The dialogue still races along, offering the occasional laugh-out-loud moment. A few characters from the earlier novels assume their usual positions, but instead of corrupt cops this time we have Mordavian gangsters. There is enough substance abuse here to light up the western world. And although most of the children here are not overtly abused, how children are treated by systems, legal and not, comes in for yet another Lehane drive-by. Those on high are offered comparable treatment. His low view of humanity overall is clear, as one does not need to have a badge or tote automatic weapons to be a really, really awful human being in this snark-noir Boston. Fast-paced, engaging, with a hero who tries to do the right thing, and more importantly thinks about what the right thing is, payload in the form of a look at some of the dark side, high and low, this is commercial Lehane on cruise control. No one will mistake Moonlight Mile for Mystic River, Lehane’s masterpiece, or The Given Day, his most ambitious work, but it will entertain, occasionally make you laugh, and shed some light into a dark corner or two.



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Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages

Other books by Lehane I have read/reviewed

The Coughlin Series
-----The Given Day
-----Live by Night
-----World Gone By

Kenzie and Gennaro
-----A Drink Before War
-----Darkness, Take My Hand
-----Sacred
-----Gone, Baby Gone
-----Prayers for Rain

Read, but not Reviewed
-----Mystic River - a masterpiece
-----Shutter Island