Prayers For Rain [Mass Market Paperback]

Prayers for Rain is Dennis Lehane's fifth installment in his intricately plotted, beautifully written, and much underacknowledged Boston mystery series. Lehane's books reflect our morally complex times, when the borders between right and wrong are somewhat blurry.

Private investigator Patrick Kenzie is in the middle of a personal crisis--he's lost his passion for the profession, and is tired of people with their "predictable vices, their predictable needs and wants and dormant desires." Angie Gennaro, his occasional sweetheart, lifelong friend, and fellow investigator has quit the business. She's still deeply resentful about Patrick's handling of the Amanda McCready case, the focus of Gone, Baby, Gone. Without Angie, private investigating has lost its fizz.

The suicide of a former client, Karen Nichols, gives Kenzie his investigative itch back. Six months earlier, Kenzie tracked down a stalker who had been harassing Nichols, and put an end to his heinous hobby. But Nichols needed more help than this PI could ever have imagined. "She'd been drowning, and I'd been busy." The successful, middle-class young woman had been sinking into a sea of drugs, alcohol, and prostitution, hitting the bottom when she jumped from the Boston Custom House. Her death consumes Kenzie--he is convinced that someone pulled her into the vortex, although her nearest and dearest simply call her weak.

Kenzie teams up with his explosive, loving, gun-toting friend Bubba Rogowski, and, after a boozy reunion, Angie Gennaro joins them. This fearless threesome must surely be the most original team in contemporary crime fiction. Good at the core--but seriously screwed up by various demons from their pasts--tact and decorum is hardly their style. They work their way across Boston, doing whatever it takes to question Nichols's family and acquaintances. By unveiling the real Nichols, tragic family secrets, betrayals, and conspiracies are also unmasked.

If you haven't experienced Dennis Lehane's world before, be prepared for an invigorating new reading experience. --Naomi Gesinger --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

After the shattering consequences of their last case (Gone, Baby, Gone), Lehane's PI partners Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are back, but not together. Estranged from Angie personally and professionally, Patrick works the old Boston neighborhoodAwith the occasional help of his loyal and happily homicidal pal Bubba RogowskiAwhile Angie has moved uptown to a blue-chip corporate security firm. Enter Karen Nichols, a nice, hard-working sort who's being stalked. Patrick and Bubba are glad to take care of the stalkerAin an extremely satisfying wayAand everybody expects a happy ending. Which no one gets, because six months later the woman dives to her death off the Custom House tower. It turns out that everything that could go wrong with her life didAall at the same time. Everyone, including the policeAand Karen's strangely unsympathetic familyAchalks it up to a streak of extraordinarily bad luck, but Patrick is suspicious. He doesn't believe in coincidences and needs Angie's help to uncover a killer whose methods seem to put him beyond the lawAone who makes his victims do the work, by manipulating their minds and lives until suicide seems a plausible alternative. Lehane's sense of place is acute, and his ear is finely attuned to the voices of Boston's many neighborhoods, as Patrick and Angie trace Karen's downward spiral, from the exclusive, cobbled streets of Beacon Hill to the wharves and bars of the North End. As the plot twists through layers of old deceit and current corruption, the victims multiply while the killer remains elusive, protected by the terror he inspires. With sharp dialogue, inventively gruesome violence and the darkest of dark humor, Lehane's fifth novel proves again that he's the hippest heir of Hammett and Chandler. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Karen Nichols is being stalked, and private investigator Patrick Kenzie learns the guy has a history of rape and sexual assault; in all cases, charges were dropped. Patrick and his arms-dealer pal Bubba Rogowski pay the stalker a visit and permanently--they believe--dissuade him from pursuing Nichols. Then Patrick learns that the very proper Nichols stripped naked and jumped to her death from a Boston landmark. Feeling guilty, Patrick, Bubba, and Patrick's former partner, Angie Gennaro, uncover the elaborate scheme that destroyed Nichols. This fifth Kenzie-Gennaro novel again features well-armed heroes who exact their own brand of vigilante justice in a Boston where the police are inept and/or helpless. As in all the best hard-boiled series, each entry reveals more about the principal characters and their relationships in a violent, uncaring world where the only verities are the ones you establish for yourself and defend vigorously. Lehane has worked his way into the top echelon of crime writers. Wes Lukowsky --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Karen Nichols's slow slide to self-destruction begins a few weeks after shamus Patrick Kenzie and his fearsome sidekick Bubba Rogowski gently discourage predatory restauranteur Cody Falk from hitting on her anymore. Her fianc gets struck by a car; she loses her job and her apartment, replacing them with drinking and drugs; and she ends her final incarnation as a prostitute by taking a header off the observation deck of Boston's Custom House. Fans of quixotic Patrick's first four cases (Gone, Baby, Gone, 1998, etc.) will recognize Karen's death as the signal for him to do some serious hunkering down. But every time he and Bubba, joined eventually by his estranged lover and ex-partner Angela Gennaro, get a promising lead about the plot that drove Karen to suicide, they hear the sound of doors slamming. Either Karen's friends and family don't know anything about the shadow that fell across her life or they're afraid to talk about it, and the sequel shows that their fears aren't in vain. But by the time the avengers lay down their arms, Karen's life from childhood on will be an open book; the scoundrels who plotted against her (and there turn out to be plenty of them, coming at Patrick in dazzling waves) will be dead or defanged; and Lehane, who writes like an angel on crystal meth, will have tapped into your most primitive fantasies of vigilante justice. It's all a fairy tale, as Patrick finally realizes. But as fairy tales go, what a scorcher! (First printing 60,000; Literary Guild main selection) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"The well-oiled plot mechanics, edge-of-the-knife dialogue and explosive bursts of violence are polished and primed in this hard-boiled shocker" -- The New York Times Book Review

The master of the new noir, Dennis Lehane delivers a shattering tale of evil, depravity, and justice that captures the dark realism of Boston’s gritty blue-collar streets.

Private Investigator Patrick Kenzie wants to know why a former client, a perky woman in love with life, could, within six months, jump naked from a Boston landmark -- the final fall in a spiral of self-destruction. What he finds is a sadistic stalker who targeted the young woman and methodically drove her to her death. A monster the law can’t touch. But Kenzie can. He and his former partner, Angela Gennaro, will fight a mind-twisting battle against this psychopath even as he turns his tricks on them.

Dennis Lehane is the author of the New York Times bestseller Mystic River; Shutter Island; Prayers for Rain; Gone, Baby, Gone; Sacred; Darkness, Take My Hand; and A Drink Before the War, which won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel. A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, he lives in the Boston area.

This gritty tale of identity, innocence and psychological warfare is endowed with the local flavor of Boston and its environs. Thomas J.S. Brown manages the task with aplomb, seamlessly switching from Patrick Kenzie's tough-edged Dorchester accent to the out-of-control, delightfully simple voice of Bubba Rogowski, Kenzie's sociopathic sidekick and guardian angel. The story has the listener laughing out loud one moment, stifling tears the next. Brown's mastery of timing, understanding of the characters, and down-to-earth voice carry the listener through a moving story. S.E.S. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.