I was over reading Dennis Lehane, had been for years, then I read a Kenzie-Gennaro this summer and kinda got into them again.
That book, A Drink Before the War, was the first in the Kenzie-Gennaro series, and it was the backdrop for all the future drama:
Angie Gennero and her husband and Patrick Kenzie were friends all the way back to high school in Dorchester. Her hubby used to be cool, but now was an abusive, alcoholic loser.
Surprise, Angie and Patrick still have the hots for each other after all these years.
That dynamic interested me more that the actual plot of the book, which like every Lehane book I every read, was kind of grimy and depressing. Wiki tells me that over the next two books they got all the personal drama sorted out and were an officially together by of this, the fourth book. So my plan was to read them in order. Request the next two books from the far-flung reaches of the Sonoma County Library system, but … one day cruising the stacks at the Rohnert Park Library there was this book right there in front of me on the shelf! So I took it! Great plans lose out to current opportunity again. 🙂
The personal drama is so well sorted out that they are just another old married couple by the beginning of this book. I would still like to read the previous two books to get the scoop on how we got from there to here!
The plot of this book is super engaging. Grimy and depressing as expected, but with so many twists and turns and drama points. I still have 100 pages to go, and I think there are still more twists and turns to go. No wonder Ben Affleck made a movie of it!
(never saw the movie … seemed too grimy and depressing at the time. :)
Halfway
Lehane really is an engaging writer. His mind seems to dwell in some dark places, so reading him isn’t exactly exactly enjoyable many times. But he sure is fun to tag along with … except for parts with the murdered babies and such.
He’s unbeatable at Boston stuff. Particularly Boston Irish, and even more particularly Dorchester Irish — which evidently is a distinct thing from Southie Irish. Whatever…
Kenzie went to high school and played league softball with the main bad guy of the first part of the book. Everybody in Dorchester had an abusive father and a long-suffering mother it seems.
The Quarry section was particularly rich in this stuff.
The good guys are preparing for a swap of a bag of cash for a kidnapped child. This gives Lehane an excuse for a couple of very well-crafted pages on the history of the Quincy Quarries, where the exchange is to happen. There are a couple of pages breaking down the styles and attitudes of the various law-enforcement groups involved:
- the paramilitary state troopers,
- Quincy cops in the front of the action: also military, but enlisted grunts rather that the goose-stepping Staties (his words!)
- Boston cops at the back of the action, looking like the waiting area at a soup kitchen
This is the quality writing that keeps me here!
At the Quarry
He’s wonderful on local color, in this case what it was like to sneak up to the quarry for a summertime swim as kids.
Then the shooting starts and it gets really complicated. It takes the next 200 pages to sort it all out.
After the Quarry
Damn this is a rough book!
Our heroes stumble on some of seriously sick child predators introduced earlier as possible suspects, and it’s really grizzly.
I think I’m gonna close out this report now. I can’t talk about the plot or the characters without giving away the story.
I will say it was a compelling story all the way up to the last 20 pages, where I just couldn’t do it anymore. The good people were going to have bad things happen to them, and the good people’s lives were going to be ruined because our hero Patrick Kenzie has a fucked-up idea of the Right Way that I have no sympathy for.
A very compelling book, though!