Newcomer Lehane shows plenty of promise in his first book about a PI duo from the mean streets of Boston. Play-rough, talk-tough Patrick Kenzie and smart, feisty Angie Gennaro don't take no lip from nobody when they're on a hot case, and their latest is hot all right. When two well-known U.S. senators ask Patrick and Angie to recover some confidential documents they believe were stolen from their office by cleaning woman Jenna Angeline, the detectives think their job will be a piece of cake: find the woman, tell the senators where she is, and let them take it from there. But of course, the case isn't that easy, and before they're finished, Patrick and Angie tackle gang warfare, corruption, prostitution, blackmail, and murder. Lehane offers slick, hip, sparkling dialogue that's as good as it gets, a plot that rockets along at warp speed, and the wonderfully original, in-your-face crime-solving duo of Kenzie and Dimassi. A terrific first novel and, one hopes, the beginning of a superb series. (Emily Melton)

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When an original voice comes along in the mystery field, it's a small miracle. When that voice not only holds up but actually improves in a second book, that's headline news in the Religion section. Lehane has followed up his Shamus Award-winning A Drink Before the War with this brutal, beautifully-written story, in which Boston detective Patrick Kenzie and his partner Angie Gennaro have to face up to some nasty ghosts from their childhood.

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Dennis Lehane won a Shamus Award for A Drink Before the War, his first book about working-class Boston detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. His second in the series, Darkness, Take My Hand, got the kind of high octane reviews that careers are made of. Now Lehane not only survives the dreaded third-book curse, he beats it to death with a stick. Sacred is a dark and dangerous updating of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, as dying billionaire Trevor Stone hires Kenzie and Gennaro to find his daughter, Desiree. Patrick's mentor, a wonderfully devious detective named Jay Becker, has already disappeared in St. Petersburg, Florida, while working the case, so the two head there to pick up a trail. Desiree, of course, is nothing like the sweet and simple beauty described by her father, and even Chandler would have been amazed by the plot twists that Lehane manages to keep coming.

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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. (Dick Adler)

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Dennis Lehane is one of the hottest practitioners of the hip contemporary PI novel. Like his fellow residents of Boston who happen to write mysteries (Robert Parker, Jeremiah Healy, Linda Barnes, etc.), Lehane offers a portrait of Boston streets at their meanest with precision and affection. But Lehane is really special. Like Michael Connelly in Los Angeles--who routinely and deservedly makes all the national bestseller lists--Lehane, with his four previous books featuring private investigator Patrick Kenzie, has managed to break loose from the pack. The mystery-reading community started collectively panting after his debut, A Drink Before the War, and they haven't stopped yet.

In Prayers for Rain the presence of Angie Gennaro is especially thrilling for those of us who regard ourselves as Patrick Kenzie fans. Enlisted, only partially against her will, to help out on the case, Angie, Patrick's ex-partner and old flame, is as efficient as ever. But, after some digging, all she can say is, "We've stumbled on to something ugly here, pal." A double-dealing shrink, incriminating sex tapes, and a lethally manipulative psychopath are just part of what Patrick, Angie, and their sidekick Bubba encounter on their way to the final bloody confrontation. Prayers for Rain is smart, full-of-feeling neo-noir, and Lehane is at the top of his form--the highest praise I can think of. (Otto Penzler)

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