Moonlight Mile
By Dennis Lehane
William Morrow
$26.99, hard cover, 324 pages, 978-0-06-202092-3 (2010)
When most folks think of Dennis Lehane novels,
But anyone who wants to capture the full breath of Lehane’s gifted writing needs to read his first novels, starting with A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR and ending with GONE, BABY, GONE (also made into an often overlooked but excellent movie featuring Casey Affleck, Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris). Those early novels feature
With MOONLIGHT MILE, Lehane returns to the case of GONE, BABY, GONE written twelve years ago. In that novel, Patrick and Angela found four-year old Amanda McCready after she vanished from a
Despite abandoning readers who enjoyed his early mystery series, Lehane still has the ability to weave the missing twelve years into the history of these engaging, thoughtful and well-developed investigators. And he still has the chops to write highly entertaining scenes.
The phone call came at three the next morning.
“You remember me?” A woman’s voice.
“What?” I was still half-asleep. I checked the called ID: Private Number.
“You found her once. Find her again.”
“Who is this?”
Her words sloshed through the phone line. “You owe me.”
“Sleep it off,” I said. “I’m hanging up.”
“You owe me.” She hung up.
The next day while walking to the subway, Patrick finds out who called him in the middle of the night.
Even so, a face appeared at the top of the stairs that I couldn’t help but be drawn to. A face I’d hoped never to see again. The weary, embattled face of a woman who’d been passed by when life was handing out luck. As I drew close to her, she tried a hesitant smile and raised a hand.
Beatrice McCready.
“Hey, Patrick.” The breeze was sharper up top and she dealt with it by burrowing into a flimsy jean jacket, the collar pulled up to her earlobes.
“Hi, Beatrice.”
“I’m sorry about the call last night. I . . .” She gave a helpless shrug and looked at the commuters for a moment.
“Don’t mention it.”
People jostled us as they headed for the turnstiles. Beatrice and I stepped off to the side, close to a white metal wall with a six-by-six subway map painted on it.
“You look good,” she said.
“You too.”
“It’s nice of you to lie,” she said.
“I wasn’t,” I lied.
I did some quick math and guessed she was about fifty. These days, fifty might be the new forty, but in her case it was the new sixty. Her once-strawberry hair was white. The lines in her face were deep enough to hide gravel in. She had the air of someone clinging to a wall of soap.
If you’ve read GONE, BABY, GONE or any of Lehane’s earlier novels, MOONLIGHT MILE is like catching up with some old friends. In a very short time, it’s like you’ve never lost touch. But Lehane ages his characters appropriately and Patrick and Angela aren’t the pedal-to-the-metal, no-holds-barred, risk-takers they were in their twenties. They’re older and wiser – but for the reader who craves the hardnosed detectives of earlier times, you may be disappointed.
My recommendation if you haven’t read the earlier Kenzie-Gennaro series? Simple. Save yourself some money on Lehane’s latest hardback and instead pick up a paperback version of any of his first four novels. You can thank me later.
Buy it on Amazon here.
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