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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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Vanished, in this complex and unsettling fourth case for PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro (after Sacred, 1997) is four-year-old Amanda McCready, taken one night from her apartment in Dorchester, a working-class section of Boston, where her mother had left her alone. Kenzie and Gennaro, hired by the child's aunt and uncle, join in an unlikely alliance with Remy Broussard and Nick Raftopoulos, known as Poole, the two cops with the department's Crimes Against Children squad who are assigned to the case. In tracing the history of Amanda's neglectful mother, whose past involved her with a drug lord and his minions, the foursome quickly find themselves tangling with Boston's crime underworld and involved in what appears to be a coup among criminals. Lehane develops plenty of tension between various pairs of parties: the good guys looking for Amanda and the bad guys who may know where she is; the two PIs and the two cops; various police and federal agencies; opposing camps in the underworld; and Patrick and Angie, who are lovers as well as business partners. All is delivered with abundant violence?e.g., bloated and mutilated corpses; gangland executions; shoot-outs with weapons of prodigious firepower; descriptions of sexual abuse of small children; threats of rape and murder?that serves to make Amanda's likely fate all the more chilling. Lehane tackles corruption in many forms as he brings his complicated plot to its satisfying resolution, at the same time leaving readers to ponder moral questions about social and individual responsibility long after the last page is turned. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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First Sentence
Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Haunting!,
By
This review is from: Gone Baby Gone (Mass Market Paperback)
This is a very well rounded novel. Dennis Lehane has gained alot of steam with each new book and I think this is my favorite of the Kenzie/Gennaro series. I wasn't quite as in love with it as Mystic River, mostly because of the extreme violence and gore it contains but the writing is very solid. The characters are very well fleshed out and real and I liked the bad guys as much as the good guys...and often it was hard to tell which was which! The key here is the moral dilemma this story unfolds and it's brilliant! The ending was perfect and while emotionally I'm in the same camp with Angie I totally understand Patrick's decision. Maybe the most terrifying thing about this book is the recognition of the horror of child abuse and neglect in our culture. It's not too difficult to imagine taking the law into your own hands after witnessing the moral deprivation described in this book regarding children...and thus the dilemma! It's really a great, thoughtful and disturbing read!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not soon forgotten,
By
This review is from: Gone Baby Gone (Mass Market Paperback)
Of the three Kenzie/Gennaro novels I have read, this was the most entertaining, if one can describe kidnapping of a child and abuse of kidnapped children by some of the most twisted people in our society "entertaining." Amanda McCready, a four year old, has been kidnapped and her aunt and uncle have sought out the dynamic duo to see if she can be found. They work out a tenuous and sometimes tense relationship with the detectives who are in charge of the investigation, yet little or no progress in finding the little girl occurs. At the half way point in the book, Patrick summarizes what they have accomplished (or not). "This was one of the most infuriating cases I'd ever worked. Absolutely nothing made sense. A four year old girl disappears. Investigation leads us to believe that the child was kidnapped by drug dealers who'd been ripped off by the mother. A ransom demand for the stolen money arrives from a woman who seems to work for the drug dealers. The ransom drop is an ambush. The drug dealers are killed. One of the drug dealers may or may not be an undercover operative for the federal government. The missing girl remains missing or at the bottom of a quarry." As it turns out, the answers are hiding in plain sight, yet it takes time, lives and luck to eventually come up with them. This is no Mystic River (few are) but, it is a good story, well told.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dark, suspenseful read,
By A Customer
This review is from: Gone Baby Gone (Mass Market Paperback)
Dennis Lehane brings his usual blend of dark humor and suspense to this story of a missing child, an addict mother, and a drug drop gone wrong. Lehane's work with abused children obviously contributes to the passion with which he writes about them in this gripping read. It was hard to put down, even though at times the grim details made me want to do just that.
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