Gone, Baby, Gone
| In his first three novels, A Drink Before
the War; Darkness, Take My Hand; and Sacred, Dennis Lehane
pushed the limits of the mystery genre. Now, in Gone, Baby, Gone,
he shatters them.
Boston private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to find four-year-old Amanda McCready, abducted from her bed on a warm, Indian summer night. They meet her stoned-out, strangely apathetic mother, her loving aunt and uncle, the mother's dangerous, drug-addled friends, and two cops who've found so many abused or dead children they may be too far over the edge to come back. |
| Despite enormous public attention, rabid news coverage,
and dogged police work, the investigation repeatedly hits a brick wall.
As the Indian summer fades and the autumn deepens, Patrick and Angie
are soon forced to face not only the horrors adults can perpetrate on innocents
but also their own conflicted feelings about what is best, and worst, when
it comes to raising children. And Amanda McCready stays gone, vanished
so completely that she seems never to have existed.
Then a second child disappears..... As the two detectives intensify their search, they encounter a media more interested in sensationalizing the abductions than solving them, a midnight ransom drop that explodes into a firefight, a city seething with secrets and rage, and a faceless power determined to keep the children lost forever. In this world of triple crosses, elaborate lies, and shrouded motives, where the villains may be more moral than victims, Patrick and Angie soon discover that the missing should probablly stay missing, and those who go looking for them may not come back alive. From its haunting opening to its shocking climax, Gone, Baby, Gone confirms Dennis Lehane's place as one of today's master storytellers and is certain to be one of the most thrilling, talked-about suspense novels you read this year. |