The human spirit is layered in contradiction. Capable in the same instant of honor or evil, little portends which path any of us chooses from second to second. The rich, gray space in between these extremes of human behavior is what makes life interesting and informs great story-telling. Dennis Lehane understands that gray world better than most any modern-day author.

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro reluctantly agree to investigate the disappearance of four-year-old Amanda McCeady from their gritty South Boston neighborhood. Amanda’s mother, Helene, left the child alone in an unlocked apartment to numb herself with alcohol and television in a neighbor’s place. With no ransom message from kidnappers and no evidence of a sexually motivated abduction, Amanda seems to have simply vanished. Local drug dealers and an odd conspiracy of child sex offenders seem good potential suspects, but something is always tilted slightly out of square. In the end, Amanda’s fate challenges Kenzie and Gennaro’s most basic understanding of right and wrong.

Lehane can throw moral certainty into chaos quicker than anyone writing these days. Any well-settled value, no matter the origin, is at risk under his gaze. After two installments in the Kenzie/Genarro mystery series focused more on slick plot and shock value, [Gone, Baby, Gone] marks Lehane’s return to uncovering the thinly veiled ambiguity and contradictions of social custom with solid story-telling and realistically conflicted characters. There are no pat answers, no happy endings here, like in life.

Bottom Line: Lehane at his morally ambiguous best; he challenges everything you think you believe in. [Gone, Baby, Gone] fulfills the promise of the debut in this series.

Five bones!!!!!
A favorite read for the year.

Not perfect but a great read. The uber-villain here was not the main villain. The book is memorable because the bad guys were also the good guys and the ending showed that sometimes the right ending isn't a just one. There are so few of these with this level of complexity. Granted his characters are violent but that is the world of Kenzie and Gennaro's Southie. Gennaro taking off at the end was a little too self-involved which was good because her and Kenzie were being a little too perfect in love. Looking forward to reading Prayers. ( )

great book ( )

Don’t judge a book by its movie, right? I absolutely LOVED the film version of Gone Baby Gone, so much so that I went right out and grabbed Moonlight Mile, the sequel book, which I also loved. I noticed a couple of discrepancies between the first movie and the second book, the most notable being that in the film version of GBG, Bea and Lionel were a childless couple. A son was mentioned in Moonlight Mile.

Before I get too far off-track, Gone Baby Gone is the story of Amanda McCready, a four-year-old girl who’s gone missing from her mother, Helene’s, ‘unlocked’ apartment. Helene is an unfit parent, no two ways about that, and her brother, Lionel, and his wife, Beatrice (Bea), step in where they can to fill the void left by her absentee parenting. When Amanda goes missing, Bea hires Patrick Kenzie and Angie Genarro, two private detectives, to augment the police investigation, which immediately (and conveniently) turns up no leads. Patrick and Angie are reluctant to take the case, having found too many dead kids and unwilling to face the personal toll it takes on them, again. Something about Bea changes their minds. The deeper they look into Helene, the more shady characters emerge from her drug muling past as probably suspects in Amanda’s kidnapping.

I’m going to stop there to avoid spoilers, but I’m going to go back to the film/book comparison because while so often Hollywood destroys a story with the cutting of scenes to pare down run time, in GBG’s case, the film did some things really right. The book features an extended cast of characters, including Bea’s son, which detracts from the believability that she’d go so far to ‘save Amanda’. There’s a line in the film where Helene criticizes Bea for ‘God making her barren’ (Helene is an ignorant, hateful character), and that simple fact made me believe that Bea would mortgage everything down to her socks to save this child who is, by proxy, ‘hers’.

Several of the characters names were changes, as were their descriptions, the most notable being Cheese “Olamon” who was an overweight white inmate in the book, and was a Haitian drug lord in the movie. Remy Broussard is Remy Bressant in the movie, and his partner Poole, was much less present. A drug transaction between Bubba and the Trents (in the movie) was a gun transaction in the book, but the end result of that grisly scene is the same. These minor changes were no big deal, but there’s a football scene in the book that I, not being a sports fan, didn’t enjoy, and it dragged on across a couple of chapters. The book seemed to take the long way around to the things the movie managed to accomplish in a line or two of succinct dialogue.

All in all, the story is incredible, but if you’ve seen the movie and enjoyed it, you, like me, might find the book a bit less powerful. The book deals a lot in low-level crime and more so in the police angle than in the Kenzie and Genarro’s dynamic. Angie is particularly unlikeable in the book, by comparison. Her squeaky clean movie image was tainted by her chain smoking, tough girl persona in the book. Helene’s character was lost in the book, which seemed less about Amanda and more about the Boston PD. I give the book four stars because I’m a Lehane fan and I’m not sure I can rate the book objectively since the translation to film was my biggest hang-up. I know, in my heart, that’s wrong. But I liked Moonlight Mile better.
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Los investigadores privados Patrick Kenzie y Angela Gennaro son contratados para encontrar a la pequeña Amanda, secuestrada de su casa en Boston. A pesar de la amplia cobertura periodística y de una tenaz investigación, las indagaciones de la policía no han dado ningún fruto. El verano ha llegado a su fin y la pequeña sigue sin aparecer; ha desaparecido sin dejar rastro. Es entonces cuando un segundo niño también desaparece. Kenzie y Gennaro pronto descubren que la búsqueda puede conducirlos a un camino sin retorno.