Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, a pair of private investigators, are hired to find a missing child. The child's mother doesn't actually appeared too bothered, and it's the grandparents who solicit the extra help: worried that time is short, they want to feel that they've exhausted every possible option in the search for their missing grandchild.

Had high hopes for this, since every other Lehane book I've read has been brilliant. And the reviews on Amazon are pretty good for this book. But: what a disappointment! This was nothing special at all - it's the sort of thing I'd expect from James Patterson: competent but nothing out of the ordinary.

I understand that there's a series of books about Kenzie and Gennaro, so I'd looked forward to reading some more, even, perhaps, the one that follows this ("Moonlight Mile") although reviews on Amazon for that book are not great ("you may not be able to resist reading this but you'll be sorry you did"). But I don't think I'll bother with any of the others.

Part of the problem here was that I couldn't work out whether Kenzie and Gennaro are meant to be realistic or not: in some cases they are friends with and go around with the cops, e.g. visiting a convict in prison to find out any information he might have that would help with the case; on the other hand they're also best buddies with some major criminals. I think Jim Rockford can plausibly be on speaking terms with both the head of the LAPD and some slightly shady street characters, but Kenzie is happy to lend a helping hand to a hoodlum who wants to go out and sell guns to some recently released child molesters (without telling the police about it afterwards).

The actual whodiddit didn't seem at all believable, and I didn't really care that much. I was very disappointed by this book. I did notice that this is the first of Lehane's books that I've read where no-one takes a cigarette out of his mouth before picking a bit of tobacco off his tongue: maybe he only does that in the good ones.

Completed : 22-Apr-2013