MOONLIGHT MILE

Author: Dennis Lehane

Genre: Mystery, Series #6

Published: 2010

Personal Rating: 3.5/5 (good)

Yearly Count: 99

From Dennis Lehane's Website:

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. 

Well, I broke a big rule of mine by reading this book.  I haven't read any Kenzie and Gennaro books, so this was clearly a jump to the latest in an established series.  It's a triple whammy of sorts because I knew I was doing it, and it was a sequel to #4 as well.  My bad, bad, bad!  What happened was that I was enticed when I saw that Moonlight Mile was a comeback couple from 10 years ago.  I had wanted to become acquainted with this couple for a long time, so this seemed like a good time to do it and Shelf Awareness delivered!  Bit of an impulsive act, but one I enjoyed.

The storyline and relationship details were explained throughout, so I wasn't lost, but I did feel like I missed out on some of their very adventurous cases and lives in general.  They are 10 years older now and are feeling that shift in time in many ways.  They question and re-question their choices and try to make sense of their current world.  All that was fine, but the plot in itself wasn't stellar for me.  I'm not a fan of mobsters, and I thought a few of the secondary characters were unappealing and not realistic; that's not a good combo.  Despite that, I have been introduced to Kenzie and Gennaro, and I feel good about the decision I made to go ahead and read this one.  Now, I need to start at the beginning and see what I missed.

          

My thanks go to Shelf Awareness and William Morrow for sending me this ARC.  Moonlight Mile is scheduled to be released on November 2, 2010.