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| Moonlight Mile |
It’s been a very long time since I’ve spent time with Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, my favorite private detectives. After publishing Prayers for Rain, I read somewhere that Dennis Lehane was going to retire the characters because he was done torturing them. I was surprised and excited to hear about Moonlight Mile, the first Kenzie and Genaro book in about a decade. I missed these characters.
Moonlight Mile revisits the events of Gone, Baby, Gone, which contained one of the thorniest ethical dilemmas I’ve ever come across. (You can read the plot summary of the book to find out what it is. If I explain what happened, it will ruin a very good book.) In Moonlight Mile, Kenzie gets a visit from an old definitely not-friend who tells him that the kidnapped girl he tracked down in the previous book has gone missing again. The new case brings up all the unfinished business of the old one.
While they were never the greatest detectives, Kenzie and Genaro are a little rusty this time. It’s not all their fault though, since nothing in this book seems to add up. There are Russian mobsters who seem awfully nice. There’s the missing girl’s family who seem even worse than they used to be. And then there’s Kenzie’s family. His four-year-old daughter keeps him from diving into the danger and taking risks. Kenzie isn’t the same man he used to be. He has bills. He has ties. But most of all, the job is getting to him. He’s tired of petty and ugly disputes.
Beyond everything else this book sets out to do, I think that this book is the end. Loose ties are wrapped up. Forgiveness is earned. Wrongs are righted (as much as they can be). Even with all that, the sense I got of this book was that it was another chance to visit with old friends before saying good bye. It wasn’t a big adventure, but it was a fun read.