Moonlight Mile: Dennis Lehane

This is another pick from the Amazon 100 list. I might have ended up reading this series anyway, because it's private detective genre. Lehane began writing back in the early 90s, and has a series of books involving a set of private detectives in Boston, MA. He's also famous for having written two other books which were made into movies - Shutter Island and Mystic River. There's about 6 or 7 books in the series with the detectives.

Typically, if I find a book in a "series", I like to go back and read the first books first. Thus, Moonlight Mile was the last one I read, after reading all the other books about the detectives first. (I haven't gotten to Shutter Island or Mystic River yet, although I probably will at some point.)

First, a couple of warnings about the books: the main characters are private detectives who grew up, and live, in the "bad" part of town. Accordingly, there's a lot of violence, and lots of language.

Now the good parts - Lehane does a wonderful job describing the characters. One of the detectives is childhood friends with a giant of a man who is a weapons dealer and all around bad guy. Every scene, in every book, with this guy (who acts as the detectives "muscle") is hilarious. There were seriously some Laugh Out Loud (LOL for you text-maniacs) moments, some of which I even read out loud to my wife. I tend to only do that when I find it really funny (and she always thinks I'm a little weird!). The style of writing is also very good - the books flow well. You can always tell a good book (at least I think so), when you finish one chapter, and just have to continue with the next, because you want to find out what happens. All of these books are like that - you don't want to put them down.

In Moonlight Mile, the detectives (Kenzie and Gennaro) are returning to a case that appeared in one of the previous books ("Gone Baby Gone"). In Gone Baby Gone, a young girl had been kidnapped from her drug-induced and alcoholic mother. Kenzie and Gennaro are hired to find the girl, and return her to her mother. I won't give away the ending of that book (cause it was a bit of a surprise), but they did find the girl, and returning her to her mother was a hard ethical/moral decision.

Moonlight Mile finds Kenzie and Gennaro separated after several bad cases, but the girl (now a promising teenager) has disappeared again. Kenzie and Gennaro are again asked to find her (although for different reasons than before), and ultimately they do. However, they again face a hard decision as to whether to return her to mother, or let her be. Both of the books were interesting for their discussion of the hard decisions - can a good decision also be the wrong decision? Or, can the wrong decision be the best decision?

If you can stomach the language and the violence, any of the books in this series are interesting and I'd recommend them.