Gone, Baby, Gone (Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro Series #4)

by Dennis Lehane

Overview

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.

Dennis Lehane is the author of Sacred; Darkness, Take My Hand, and A Drink Before the War which won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel presented by the Private Eye Writers of America, and was also a Boston Globe best-seller. Lehane was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and still lives in the Boston area. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061336218
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	09/07/2010
Series:	Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro Series , #4
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	412
Sales rank:	39,487
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Dennis Lehane is the author of ten previous novels—including the New York Times bestsellers Live by Night; Moonlight Mile; Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; and The Given Day—as well as Coronado, a collection of short stories and a play. He and his wife, Angie, currently live in California with their children.

Hometown:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

August 4, 1965

Place of Birth:

Dorchester, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A., Eckerd College, 1988; M.F.A., Florida International University, 1993

Website:

http://www.dennislehanebooks.com

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.

Of those, a large portion are abducted by one parent estranged from the other, and over fifty percent of the time the child's whereabouts are never in question. The majority of these children are returned within a week.

Another portion of those twenty-three hundred children are runaways. Again, the majority of them are not gone long, and usually their whereabouts are either known immediately or easily ascertained--a friend's house is the most common destination.

Another category of missing children is the throwaway--those who are cast out of their homes or who run away, and the parents decide not to give chase. These are often the children who fill shelters and bus terminals, street comers in the red-light districts, and, ultimately, prisons.

Of the more than eight hundred thousand children reported missing nationally every year, only thirty-five hundred to four thousand fall into what the Department of Justice categorizes as Non-Family Abductions, or cases in which the police soon rule out family abductions, running away, parental ejection, or the child becoming lost or injured.

Of these cases, three hundred children disappear every year and never return.

No one--not parents, friends, law enforcement, childcare organizations, or centers for missing people--knows where these children go. Into graves, possibly; into cellars or the homes of pedophiles; into voids, perhaps, holes in the fabric of the universe where they will never be heard from again.

Wherever these three hundred go, they stay gone. For a moment or two they hauntstrangers who've heard of their cases, haunt their loved ones for far longer.

Without a body to leave behind, proof of their passing, they don't die. They keep us aware of the void.

And they stay gone.

"My sister," Lionel McCready said, as he paced our belfry office, "has had a very difficult life." Lionel was a big man with a slightly houndish sag to his face and wide shoulders that slanted down hard from his collarbone, as if something we couldn't see sat atop them. He had a shaggy, shy smile and a firm grip in a callused hand. He wore a brown UPS deliveryman's uniform and kneaded the brim of the matching brown baseball cap in his beefy hands. "Our mom was a--well, a boozer, frankly. And our dad left when we were both little kids. When you grow up that way, you--I guess you--maybe you got a lot of anger. It takes some time to get your head straight, figure out your way in life. It's not just Helene. I mean, I had some serious problems, took a hard bust in my twenties. I was no angel."

"Lionel," his wife said.

He held up a hand to her, as if he had to spit it out now or he'd never spit it out at all. "I was lucky. I met Beatrice, straightened my life out. What I'm saying, Mr. Kenzie, Miss Gennaro, is that if you're given time, a few breaks, you grow up. You shake that crap. My sister, she's still growing up, what I'm saying. Maybe. Because her life was hard and--"

"Lionel," his wife said, "stop making excuses for Helene." Beatrice McCready ran a hand through her short strawberry hair and said, "Honey, sit down. Please."

Lionel said, "I'm just trying to explain that Helene hasn't had an easy life."

"Neither have you," Beatrice said, "and you're a good father. "

"How many kids do you have?" Angie asked.

Beatrice smiled. "One. Matt. He's five. He's stayingwith my brother and his wife until we find Amanda."

Lionel seemed to perk up a bit at the mention of his son. "He's a great kid," he said, and seemed almost embarrassed by his pride.

"And Amanda?" I said.

"She's a terrific kid, too," Beatrice said. "And she's way too young to be out there on her own."

Amanda McCready had disappeared from this neighborhood three days ago. Since then, the entire city of Boston, it seemed, had become obsessed with her whereabouts. The police had put more men on the search than they had on the manhunt for John Salvi after the abortion clinic shootings four years ago. The mayor held a press conference in which he pledged no city business would take precedence over her disappearance until she was found. The press coverage was saturating: front page of both papers each morning, lead story in all three major telecasts at night, hourly updates inserted between the soaps and talk shows.

And in three days--nothing. Not a hint of her.

Amanda McCready had been on this earth four years and seven months when she vanished. Her mother had put her to bed on Sunday night, checked in on her once around eight-thirty, and the next morning, shortly after nine, had looked in at Amanda's bed and seen nothing but sheets dented with the wrinkled impression, of her daughter's body.

The clothes Helene McCready had laid out for r daughter--a pink, T-shirt, denim shorts, pink socks, and white sneakers--were gone, as was Amanda's favorite doll, a blond-haired replica of a three-year-old that bore an errie resemblance to its owner, and whom amanda had named Pea. The room showed no sign of struggle.

Table of Contents

What People are Saying About This

James Patterson

Gone, Baby Gone is a tough, true powerful story written by a stunningly good novelist, one of our very best.

Editorial Reviews

Vanished, in this complex and unsettling fourth case for PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro (after Sacred, 1997) is four-year-old Amanda McCready, taken one night from her apartment in Dorchester, a working-class section of Boston, where her mother had left her alone. Kenzie and Gennaro, hired by the child's aunt and uncle, join in an unlikely alliance with Remy Broussard and Nick Raftopoulos, known as Poole, the two cops with the department's Crimes Against Children squad who are assigned to the case. In tracing the history of Amanda's neglectful mother, whose past involved her with a drug lord and his minions, the foursome quickly find themselves tangling with Boston's crime underworld and involved in what appears to be a coup among criminals. Lehane develops plenty of tension between various pairs of parties: the good guys looking for Amanda and the bad guys who may know where she is; the two PIs and the two cops; various police and federal agencies; opposing camps in the underworld; and Patrick and Angie, who are lovers as well as business partners. All is delivered with abundant violence--e.g., bloated and mutilated corpses; gangland executions; shoot-outs with weapons of prodigious firepower; descriptions of sexual abuse of small children; threats of rape and murder--that serves to make Amanda's likely fate all the more chilling. Lehane tackles corruption in many forms as he brings his complicated plot to its satisfying resolution, at the same time leaving readers to ponder moral questions about social and individual responsibility long after the last page is turned.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Four-year-old Amanda McCready has disappeared without a trace, and after several days, the police have no leads. Boston PIs Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro reluctantly take the case, knowing that the odds are that Amanda is already dead. Their investigation is complicated by Amanda's mother, Helene, who seems more interested in drinking at the local bar than in finding her daughter. After a second child disappears, Kenzie and Gennaro are drawn into a dark nexus of pedophiles, drug dealers, and a shady police unit with a hidden agenda. Ultimately, the detectives must make a decision that could destroy both their personal and professional relationship. Lehane, a Shamus Award winner for A Drink Before the War (LJ 11/1/94), has written a tense, edge-of-your-seat story about a world that is astoundingly cruel and unbearably violent to its most innocent members. This fourth Kenzie-Gennaro pairing will appeal to readers who like their mysteries coated with a heavy dose of realism and their endings left untidied. Recommended for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/98.]--Karen Anderson, Arizona State Univ. West Lib., Phoenix

Library Journal

What I'm feeling at the end of a truly compelling read is a sense of darkness, and I'm not enjoying the feeling....Strong suspense, well-developed characters and believable relationships combine with a haunting style to make for an unforgettable novel....I would not call myself faint-hearted, but I can't help but wish this talent were accompanied by a vision less bleak.
— The Mystery Reader.com

Jeri Wright

A hundred and fifty Boston cops are looking for four-year-old Amanda McCready, but her Aunt Beatrice and Uncle Lionel don't think that's enough, and they want Dorchester shamus Patrick Kenzie and his live-in partner Angela Gennaro (Sacred, 1997, etc.) to make it 152. Patrick's not hot for the case, particularly after he meets Amanda's mother Helene, who's one shiftless piece of work—she parked Amanda alone while she went out drinking with a pair of friends. And once they've thrown in with the McCreadys, they find that Helene is only the sideshow to a ripely disgusting big top of drug dealers, pederasts, psycho-sadists, convicts who keep ruling their fiefdoms from inside the big house, and a crack police unit—Crimes Against Children—whose zealous officers don't give an inch to the bad guys in the way of toughness, violence, or lack of scruples. Noticing a couple of details that escaped all those cops on the loose enables Patrick to contact Amanda's kidnappers and set up a ransom drop, but it all goes horribly wrong—as does his attempt to recover a second child snatched several months later, in a case that reveals the truth to Patrick at the cost of his love life, his illusions about parenthood and the law, and his ability to sleep nights. Darkly and extravagantly imagined, full of harrowing action sequences and shamelessly emotional highs and lows nobody else would have dared to invent.

Kirkus Reviews