Moonlight Mile

Twelve years have passed since private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro located and returned the abducted Amanda McCready. Since that time, Patrick and Angie have gotten married and have a child of their own. Now 16, Amanda has gone missing again, and it is up to the pair to find her. This time, however, there is more at stake than Amanda’s own life.

Picking up where 1998’s Gone, Baby, Gone and Prayers for Rain left off, Dennis Lehane returns to his long-running detective series after forays into historical fiction (The Given Day) and television writing (The Wire). As a stylist, he hasn’t lost a beat. Patrick remains an engaging narrator: as tough and cynical as his job requires him to be, but also full of smartassery, pop culture quips, moral wrangling, and, above all, compassion. His back-and-forth banter and relationship-threatening arguments with Angie are back too, but the former Miss Gennaro feels shoved into the background in this latest outing. It’s a shame to see such a strong character demoted from partner-in-crime to wife/mom who is just along for the ride.

Characterization, on the whole, is something Lehane (surprisingly) botches here. There will always be bright spots (namely, the return of incorrigible psychopath/loyal best friend Bubba Rogowski, who tells a henchman, “I’ll kill you because you’re short.”), but the layers of humanity and despair that previously marked Lehane’s characters are missing here. Far too much is played for laughs. The book’s crazed Russian mobster antagonists are stock, seemingly coming to us straight from the set of Running Scared. And Amanda’s selfish, neglectful mother Helene, a rightfully reviled character in Gone, Baby, Gone, comes off more like a drug-addled clown here. Then there’s Amanda herself. Lehane continually reminds us of how she is mature and intelligent beyond her years, which makes her seem capable of anything and drains the book of tension and suspense.

That isn’t to say that there is nothing at Moonlight Mile’s core. The book traffics in themes of maturity and the perils of aging. Patrick and Angie are in their early 40s now. They must accept the fact that they can no longer put their lives in danger for crusades on behalf of their clients. They must also come to terms with the fact that the rough-and-tumble, blue collar Boston that bred them is almost unrecognizable now. It is watching them adapt to their respective challenges (Patrick working a corporate job, Angie doing the stay-at-home mom thing) that holds this book up when the plot crumbles.

In spite of the finality suggested by the conclusion, it is difficult to say whether or not Moonlight Mile will in fact be Patrick and Angie’s last hurrah. If this is the end, then it comes as a bit of a disappointment (Gone, Baby, Gone, A Drink Before the War, and Darkness, Take My Hand were all far superior). Nevertheless, it is a book that Lehane had to write: a weak send-off is far more preferable than keeping these characters on the shelf for another dozen years and pretending that it is still the mid-to-late ‘90s.

7.5/10