Dennis Lehane Books In Order

A Drink Before the War

Kenzie and Gennaro are private investigators in the blue collar neighborhoods and ghettos of South Boston they know it as only natives can. Working out of an old church belfry, Kenzie and Gennaro take on a seemingly simple assignment for a prominent politician: to uncover the whereabouts of Jenna Angeline, a black cleaning woman who has allegedly stolenconfidential state documents. Finding Jenna, however, is easy compared to staying alive once they’ve got her. The investigation escalates, implicating members of Jenna’s family and rival gang leaders whileuncovering extortion, assassination, and child prostitution extending from bombed out ghetto streets to the highest levels of government. A Drink Before the War, the first in Lehane’s acclaimed series with Boston detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, is a remarkable debut that is at once a pulsating crime thriller and a mirror of our world, one in which the worst human horrors are found closest to home, and the most vicious obscenities are committed in the name of love.

Darkness, Take My Hand

Gritty and thoroughly engaging, this is the electrifying sequel to Dennis Lehane’s best selling debut novel, A Drink Before the War. Tough talking, hard playing Boston private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are enjoying an Indian summer when they are called to their next case. Dr. Diandra Warren, a prominent psychiatrist believes she has inadvertently angered a powerful member of the Boston Irish mafia and asks Patrick and Angie to protect her vulnerable son from retribution. Can the detectives shield him from the thug who is not only right hand man to the head of the Irish Mafia, but who grew up with Patrick and Angie? Can Dr. Warren’s ex husband, the most powerful district attorney in the Boston area, help to protect his estranged son?As the detectives are drawn deeper into the case, bodies begin piling up around them. The clues begin to point to an unlikely suspect a serial killer who has been in prison for twenty years of a life sentence. Patrick and Angie must find out if he has indeed inexplicably resurfaced and what, if anything, his connection is to the people from their neighborhood.

Sacred

Dying billionaire Trevor Stone hires private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro to find his missing daughter. Grief stricken over the death of her mother and the impending death of her father, Desiree Stone has been missing for three weeks. So has the first investigator Stone hired to find her: Jay Becker, Patrick’s mentor. Patrick and Angie are led down a trail of half truths and corruption into a world in which a therapeutic organization may be fronting for a dangerous and seductive cult, a high tech private investigation firm may be covering up lethal crimes, and a stolen cache of millions in illegal funds may be tied to both disappearances and a tanker full of hero*in. Nothing is what it seems as the detectives travel from the windblown streets of Boston to the rum punch sunsets of Florida’s Gulf Coast. And the more Patrick and Angie discover, the more they realize that on this case any wrong step will certainly be their last…
Snappy dialogue, explosive action scenes, and original characters have become Dennis Lehane’s trademarks. With Sacred, Lehane confirms his status as today’s hottest young author of first rate mysteries that are also smartly written literary novels.

Gone, Baby, Gone

Boston private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to find four year old Amanda McCready, abducted from her bed on a warm, 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. Led into a world of drug dealers, child molesters, and merciless executioners, 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 as the Indian summer fades and the autumn chill deepens, Amanda McCready stays gone, banished so completely that she seems never to have existed. Then another child disappears…
. Dennis Lehane takes you into a world of triple crosses, elaborate lies, and shrouded motives, where the villains may be more moral than the victims, the missing should possibly stay missing, and those who go looking for them may not come back alive. Settle in and turn off the phone. From its haunting opening to its shocking climax, Gone, Baby, Gone is certain to be one of the most thrilling, talked about suspense novels you read this year.

Prayers for Rain

What if a total stranger was watching your every move? What if he read your mail, listened in on your phone calls, knew what you spoke of only to your most trusted confidants? What if he learned Your routines? Your weaknesses? And, most important, what if he discovered those things you love and cling to…
and then he stripped you of them? And sat back to watch while you self destructed?Boston private investigator Patrick Kenzie is about to anger such a man. When Patrick first meets Karen Nichols, she strikes him as the kind of woman who irons her socks an innocent from a protected upbringing, untouched by tragedy. But six months later Karen commits suicide by leaping from one of Boston’s most cherished monuments. Patrick finds himself wondering what can alter someone so drastically, so quickly, that suicide seems her only option. Yet what begins as idle curiosity soon becomes obsessive as Patrick suspects that the tragic events that befell Karen during the last months of her life an ‘accident’ that destroyed her fianc ; the loss of her job, her apartment, and eventually her mind may not have been as random as they first appeared. Enlisting the aid of his ex partner and ex flame, Angela Gennaro, as well as that of his friend, the lethally unbalanced Bubba Rogowski, Patrick enters into a treacherous game of cat and mouse with a man who, instead of merely killing his victims, prefers to make them wish they were dead. Through the final weeks of a stifling summer, Patrick, Angie, and Bubba wage psychological warfare with this brilliant, depraved sociopath a war that will bring them face to face with the sordid secrets of an affluent family, a brutal Mafioso, a cabal of twisted kidnappers, and a perilous encounter in the misty dark of a cranberry bog. As the stakes grow higher and more personal, they find they might be fighting a losing battleagainst an enemy the law can’t touch, who is always one step ahead of them, who is gradually learning their weaknesses, their loves, and is determined to tear their worlds apart.

Moonlight Mile

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane delivers an explosive tale of integrity and vengeance heralding the long awaited return of private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston neighborhood twelve years ago. Desperate pleas for help from the child’s aunt led investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home. Now Amanda is sixteen and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing. Yet Amanda’s aunt is once more knocking on Patrick Kenzie’s door, fearing the worst for the little girl who has blossomed into a striking, clever young woman a woman who hasn’t been seen in weeks. Haunted by their consciences, Kenzie and Gennaro revisit the case that troubled them the most. Their search leads them into a world of identity thieves, methamphetamine dealers, a mentally unstable crime boss and his equally demented wife, a priceless, thousand year old cross, and a happily homicidal Russian gangster. It’s a world in which motives and allegiances constantly shift and mistakes are fatal. In their desperate fight to confront the past and find Amanda McCready, Kenzie and Gennaro will be forced to question if it’s possible to do the wrong thing and still be right or to do the right thing and still be wrong. As they face an evil that goes beyond broken families and broken dreams, they discover that the sins of yesterday don’t always stay buried and the crimes of today could end their lives.

The Given Day

Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane’s long awaited eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads between past and future. Filled with a cast of unforgettable characters more richly drawn than any Lehane has ever created, The Given Day tells the story of two families one black, one white swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power. Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city’s most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.

Here, too, are some of the most influential figures of the era Babe Ruth; Eugene O’Neill; leftist activist Jack Reed; NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s ruthless Red chasing attorney general; cunning Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge; and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover.

Coursing through some of the pivotal events of the time including the Spanish Influenza pandemic and culminating in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, they gradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives.

Mystic River

‘There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.’ When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled tip to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty five years later, Sean Devine is a homicide detective. Jimmy Marcus is an ex con who owns a corner store. And Dave Boyle is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay demons that urge him to do terrible things. When Jimmy Marcus’s daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine is assigned to the case. His personal life unraveling, he must go back into a world he thought he’d left behind to confront not only the violence, of the present but the nightmares of his past. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy Marcus, who finds that his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave Boyle, who came home the night Jimmy’s daughter died covered with someone else’s blood. While Sean Devine attempts to use the law to return peace and order to the neighborhood, Jimmy Marcus finds his need for vengeance pushing him ever closer to a moral abyss from which lie wont be able to return, and Dave’s wife, Celeste, sleeps at night with a man she fears may very well be a monster. a monster who fathered her child and hides his true nature from everyone, possibly even himself.A tense and unnerving psychological thriller, Mystic River is also an epic novel of love and loyalty, faith and family, in which people irrevocably marked by the past find themselves on a collision course with the darkest truths of their own hidden selves.

Shutter Island

London: Scorpion Press, 2003. Limited/Numbered 1st Edition of 95 HC Copies, Signed on presentation page. Appreciation by Ian Rankin. Quarter leather cover w. marbled boards and transparent plastic dust jacket. From Publishers Weekly Lehane’s new novel, his first since Mystic River, carries an ending so shocking yet so faithful to what has come before, that it will go down as one of the most aesthetically right resolutions ever written. But as anyone who has read him knows, Lehane, despite his mastery of the mechanics of suspense, is about much more than twists; here, he’s in pursuit of the nature of self knowledge and self deception, and the ways in which both can be warped by violence and evil. In summer 1954, two U.S. marshals, protagonist Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, arrive on Shutter Island, not far from Boston, to investigate the disappearance of patient Rachel Solando from the prison/hospital for the criminally insane that dominates the island. The marshals’ digging gets them nowhere fast as they learn of Rachel’s apparently miraculous escape past locked doors and myriad guards, and as they encounter roadblocks and lies strewn across their path most notably by the hospital’s chief physician, the enigmatic J. Cawley and pick up hints of illegal brain surgery performed at the hospital. Then, as a major hurricane bears down on the island, inciting a riot among the insane and cutting off all access to the mainland, they begin to fear for their lives. All of the characters particularly Teddy, haunted by the tragic death of his wife are wonderful creations, but no more wonderful than the spot on dialogue with which Lehane brings them to life. There are mysteries within mysteries in this novel, some as obvious as the numerical codes that the missing patient leaves behind and which Teddy, a code breaker in WWII, must solve; some as deep as the most profound fears of the human heart. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Coronado

From Dennis Lehane, the award winning author of Mystic River, Shutter Island, and the Kenzie Gennaro series, comes a striking collection of five short stories and a play. A small southern town gives birth to a dangerous man with a broken heart and a high powered rifle…
. A young girl, caught up in an inner city gang war, crosses the line from victim to avenger…
. An innocent man is hunted by government agents for an unspecified crime…
. A boy and a girl fall in love while ransacking a rich man’s house during the waning days of the Vietnam War…
. A compromised psychiatrist confronts the unstable patient he slept with…
. A father and a son wage a lethal battle of wits over the whereabouts of a stolen diamond and a missing woman…
. Along with completely original material, this new col lection is a compilation of the best of Dennis Lehane’s previously published short stories, including ‘Until Gwen,’ which was adapted for the stage in 2005 and appears in this book as the play Coronado. At turns suspenseful, surreal, romantic, and tragically comic, these tales journey headlong into the heart of our national myths& 8212about class, gender, freedom, and regeneration through violence& 8212and reveal that the truth waiting for us there is not what we’d expect.

Shutter Island

London: Scorpion Press, 2003. Limited/Numbered 1st Edition of 95 HC Copies, Signed on presentation page. Appreciation by Ian Rankin. Quarter leather cover w. marbled boards and transparent plastic dust jacket. From Publishers Weekly Lehane’s new novel, his first since Mystic River, carries an ending so shocking yet so faithful to what has come before, that it will go down as one of the most aesthetically right resolutions ever written. But as anyone who has read him knows, Lehane, despite his mastery of the mechanics of suspense, is about much more than twists; here, he’s in pursuit of the nature of self knowledge and self deception, and the ways in which both can be warped by violence and evil. In summer 1954, two U.S. marshals, protagonist Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, arrive on Shutter Island, not far from Boston, to investigate the disappearance of patient Rachel Solando from the prison/hospital for the criminally insane that dominates the island. The marshals’ digging gets them nowhere fast as they learn of Rachel’s apparently miraculous escape past locked doors and myriad guards, and as they encounter roadblocks and lies strewn across their path most notably by the hospital’s chief physician, the enigmatic J. Cawley and pick up hints of illegal brain surgery performed at the hospital. Then, as a major hurricane bears down on the island, inciting a riot among the insane and cutting off all access to the mainland, they begin to fear for their lives. All of the characters particularly Teddy, haunted by the tragic death of his wife are wonderful creations, but no more wonderful than the spot on dialogue with which Lehane brings them to life. There are mysteries within mysteries in this novel, some as obvious as the numerical codes that the missing patient leaves behind and which Teddy, a code breaker in WWII, must solve; some as deep as the most profound fears of the human heart. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Mighty Johns

Additional stories include: The Ehrengraf Reverse by Lawrence Block Semi Pro by James Crumley A Sunday in January by Brendan DuBois Whatever it Takes to Win by Tim Green Good Seats by Colin Harrison Gone Down to Corpus by Dennis Lehane No Thing by Mike Lupica The Empire Strikes Back by Brad Meltzer The Arcane Receiver by Carol O’Connell The End of Innocence by Anne Perry Hollywood Spring and Axle by Gary Phillips Gone to the Dawgs by Peter Robinson Rumors of Gravity by John Westermann These tales of football and in one case European football, rugby include macabre deaths, ultimate suspense, theft, drugs, big money and football. Tales of Super Bowl Sunday, NFL teams, has been players, great fans, and final plays are a collection like no other. All the best writers in one book, edited by the famous Otto Penzler, founder of The Mysterious Press.

Boston Noir

There was only ever one candidate for the job of assembling Boston Noir: Dennis Lehane!

The Best American Mystery Stories 2010

Best selling novelist Lee Child edits this latest collection of the genre’s finest from the past year. Featuring gritty tales told with panache, this is a must read for anybody who cares about crime stories Booklist.