Fri 11 Feb 2011
DENNIS LEHANE – Moonlight Mile. William Morrow, hardcover, November 2010.
It is twelve years after the end of Gone Baby Gone (1998). [PLOT WARNING: There is no way this current book can be reviewed without revealing the ending of the previous one. This review is no different.]
After a year of separation, Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are not only got back together again, they married and now have a young daughter. But the economy has been brutal to Patrick’s PI business — he has no work and worries how he will pay the medical insurance bill that is due at the end of the month.
Into this setting comes the case that broke them apart — Amanda McCready is now sixteen, and has run away from home. Before, when Patrick returned her to her addicted mother when she was four, he did the right thing legally — but did not help her.
Instead he took her away from the only loving parents she had ever known (even if they had kidnapped her), and got them imprisoned for trying to do the right thing and protect Amanda from her drugged mother. Now Amanda is on the run again — and her druggie mother and her drug dealer father in law want to find her — but not, Patrick suspects, for the reasons they are saying.
Is this a chance for a Patrick to make amends for making the wrong decision even if it was the right one legally — and help and protect Amanda from her parents, and others who are pursuing her?
A weak entry in the series; it reads more like an attempt by Lehane to end it right this time. A fast enough read but without the biting ending of the previous novel.
Rating: B minus.
February 11th, 2011 at 6:49 pm
Having obtained a copy of this book in hardcover, I decided I ought to read GONE BABY GONE before tackling this long-delayed followup sequel.
I wasn’t too impressed. The action-packed scene at the water-filled quarry at midnight. about two-thirds of the way through was the big stumbling block for me, more than the ending that seems to have bothered a lot of people.
If Kenzie and Gennaro had taken the time to sort out who was where and doing what to whom when, I think they’d have cracked the case a whole lot sooner. But they didn’t. I was confused and so were they.
And I haven’t yet read this book, but Stan, I think you’re right on the money with your observation in the last paragraph.
— Steve
February 11th, 2011 at 11:37 pm
I was always a big fan of the Kenzie & Gennaro series (though progressively slightly less so after the second one, DTMH*).
I WAS a big fan until this near-disaster, which as Stan –and Steve, if I am reading HIS last paragraph correctly–is nothing less than a stunning disappointment.
I’d give this one a C-, and that high probably only because of my admiration for A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR and, possibly the best serial killer thriller I have ever read, *DARKNESS TAKE MY HAND.