gone, baby, gone

Gone, Baby, Gone was my first Dennis Lehane novel. Lehane came recommended to me this way, and I'm paraphrasing, Lehane writes about South Boston and Dorchester; its where his stories take place, and his character's come from. The stories are great, well written and fast. That's a pretty good description of the book I just finished. They made some movies from some of his books too, he told me, like, well... like, I don't remember.

I picked this book up used at a book sale/fund raiser in a library for 50 cents, or something. The author's name caught my eye. If I had been more thoughtful about it, I might have figured out what order the books were written in, as I got the distinct feeling that these were reoccurring characters very quickly, and that was confirmed when some of the details of older escapades crept into the narrative later on, and I found myself thinking: well, I know how that one ends, now don't I?

The paperback copy I have is published by Avon Books, and they list 4 other titles in the front matter by Lehane. Now I don't know anything about Lehane other than what my friend told me, but it seems to me that there should be more than 4 books, and none of the titles listed sounded like a movie I'd heard about, so I looked him up on my LibraryThing account. So yes, now I know who this guy is. Mystic River, right, that sounds like a movie. And Gone, Baby, Gone, as you probably already know, is also a movie (maybe I don't get out enough.) Shutter Island, yes, movie. I haven't seen any of these, but I have vague recollections of hearing they were good. So now I have a loose plan which includes reading some of the other things Lehane has written, and maybe checking out some movies too.

Gone, Baby, Gone was a fast read, tightly written, with bits of humor, and horror, sprinkled liberally throughout. A chapter or two were hard to read. Lehane seems like a guy who can read about the worst things that can happen in life, hear the most depraved stories of cruel and inhuman behavior that people are capable of, and write about it with clarity and simplicity such that the rawness of it reaches down below your conscience mind and pokes at that primal part of your brain where the animal still lives. I warned my wife about the emotions this book creates.