Book #102: Gone, Baby, Gone

Book #102: Gone, Baby, Gone by Dennis Lehane

August 1, 2014


In an attempt to find a book that I could get really excited about reading, I referred to my ebook "wish list" on my local library's ebook site. I had, of course, read the short story collection Boston Noir, which Lehane edited and contributed to, a few months ago. When I saw that this particular book was available, I got that excited feeling, that "I really fucking want to read this book right now" feeling. Mission accomplished.

Now, if I hadn't heard of the film (which I haven't seen, but I do know that as the acclaimed director, it took Ben Affleck from the status of "Matt Damon's slacker friend" to someone to take seriously in Hollywood), I probably wouldn't have been as interested in this book, due to the fact that it's the fourth book in a series (of six, at least at this point?) about Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. And obviously I haven't read any of the other books. But I can say honestly that it's not really necessary to read the other books to get what's going on, or to understand the relationship between the two main characters. There's some references made to events in the previous books, I guess, but these seem realistic, as Kenzie (the narrator) reflects on some of these traumatic, violent events that almost took his and Angie's lives. Also, one previous situation has bearing in this book; it would be unrealistic to think that they could kill a pimp and not ever have it come back to haunt them.

So Kenzie and Gennaro are partners of their own private investigation firm, and they are a couple. By the end of the book, Angie is moving out of their apartment, but I'm pretty sure they get back together in one of the following books. She's very upset about how the whole situation went down, while Kenzie grapples with whether or not they did the right thing, too. They technically did the job they'd originally been hired to do: they found the little girl, Amanda McCready, and returned her to her mother. But was it the right thing to do?

Last fall, I had a conversation with a classmate of mine. Our discussion of a book that talked about child abuse had reminded her of a movie she'd seen. She couldn't remember the title, but she was talking aboutThe Tall Man, starring Mrs. Justin Timberlake. In that movie, the legend of the Tall Man snatching kids from their homes is a cover, I guess, for a conspiracy to kidnap kids from their abusive, negligent parents, and to send them off to "better" lives. If I'd read this book before that conversation, I would have brought it up, because it examines just the same moral questions as that movie does.

Helene McCready is a crappy parent. She's lazy, she does drugs and neglects the basic needs of her daughter, and her brother, who went through the same crappy childhood as his sister but grew up to be a responsible person, has had enough. He gets together with a friend of his, a detective, who is like "the Tall Man" in this situation. When Kenzie and Gennaro have finally put together the complicated pieces of the puzzle, they figure out that Amanda, nearly a year after she disappeared from her mother's unlocked (and unsupervised) apartment, is alive and well with a higher-ranking police officer and his wife, and receiving the love and care that she never did at home. Gennaro wants to leave her be; Kenzie goes along with his cop buddies who helped them stake out the place, and they have the couple arrested and Amanda sent back. The book asks the question: who were the real criminals here?

But what I want to know is, what makes these people the way that they are in the first place? Why does Helene neglect her child in the first place? Why is she so dumb, and addicted to crappy television? Why were the Tretts and their buddy such monsters? The most horrifying part of the book is when Kenzie, Gennaro, and the two cops they'd worked with on Amanda's case (not knowing that those two were in on the kidnapping plot themselves) run a bust on a house where these three child molesters are staying, knowing that they have a kidnapped little boy inside. The boy's there, all right, but they're an hour too late to save him: he's been killed in the most gruesome way possible, and the time leading up to his death since he'd been kidnapped were horrifying enough themselves. This is truly a gritty book.

The Tretts were meant to serve as a contrast to the Doyles (the couple that had Amanda), clearly. I mean, undoubtedly it is very very very wrong and evil to kidnap children and exploit them, or torture them, or do anything to harm them in any way. That's the kind of thing that the cops who kidnapped Amanda had been working against all through their careers, and they witnessed a lot of horrible shit as they tried to save so, so many children. And clearly, the Doyles were nothing like the Tretts. The Doyles wanted to love Amanda and give her a good home, and Kenzie himself could clearly see that the girl was happy as they spied on them. So there's definitely shades of gray in this area, for sure. And, Kenzie seems pretty sure that Amanda won't be better off back with her lazy, uncaring mother. And yet, would it have been right for them to allow the Doyles to get away with it?

A lot of reviews I've seen of this book have called it one of Lehane's best works, and the best of the Kenzie and Gennaro stories. Having not read anything else by him, I could believe it, because this book isn't quite like your average mystery-thriller. The heart of the story are these gray areas that the book explores, and its gritty realism. When I was in the 7th grade, I got into the mysteries by Mary Higgins Clark. I would be embarrassed to read something like that now, and even then I got to noticing that her plots were kind of formulaic; I really came to know what to expect. There were not nearly as many moral gray areas in her works. I remember some stories where seemingly "good guys" ended up being "bad guys," and they were rightfully punished in the end. In Lehane's work, there are not many clear "good guys" or "bad guys." Even Kenzie himself takes part in some questionable activities, and pals around with some unsavory characters, yet I certainly wouldn't say that he's "bad."

This book allowed me to appreciate again how complicated it would be to write a good mystery story. That's one genre that I'll probably never try writing myself, because I feel like if it's not done really well, everything seems sloppy. Lehane mostly did a good job of satisfying me on most points of this mystery, without forcing a happy outcome onto all of the "deserving" characters. Life isn't about what people deserve, it's about what they get. But there's one small detail that's bugging me, and I think I'll have to refer back to the text for this one. I feel like when Kenzie and Gennaro went into Amanda's room, that they saw the doll Pea lying on the floor. This was after Amanda was taken, mind you. Now, when they were at a quarry, Gennaro became convinced that Amanda had been killed and dropped in because she saw that doll in the water. But but but, Amanda didn't have the doll when she was kidnapped...she couldn't have, it got left behind. Yet none of the characters ever acknowledge this; in fact, Broussard, one detective who was in on the kidnapping plot, thought this was a clever move on his part, making it look like Amanda was dead so that they'd stop looking at her. But clearly, it was a sloppy move, yet it's never acknowledged. Am I wrong?

But, other than that nagging detail (which, now that I've looked back, it could be another doll that they see in the room...but did Amanda even have Pea with her when she was taken, though?), I was very impressed with the book, and I am dying to see the movie. Not on Netflix at this point, but I think I will rent it off Amazon. And I will be reading another book by Lehane before too long.