A Drink Before the War (Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro Series #1) » (Reissue)

Boston and its environs are the setting for most of Dennis Lehane s fiction. From gritty inner-city motels to the lavish suburbs, Lehane brings a Boston subculture and its vivid characters to life in his detective novels. Lehane fans return time and time again for his tense psychological thrillers that chip away at secrets deep within the human soul.

A cadre of powerful Massachusetts politicians offers Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro big money for a small job: find the missing cleaning woman who allegedly stole confidential Statehouse documents. But there's much more to this crime than anyone realizes. What the woman was really after was justice—and out on the Boston streets, the truth can turn stark and ugly...

This is it: the novel that introduces the newest sensation in detective fiction, Dennis Lehane, and a couple of gritty private investigators who grew up and grew tough in blue-collar Dorchester. Kenzie and Gennaro have opened their own agency from the belfry of a Boston church—and all manner of unholiness is crossing their threshold. Like it or not, they're headed for a deadly crossfire in a case that's not just about right and wrong—it's all-out war.

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Newcomer Lehane shows plenty of promise in his first book about a PI duo from the mean streets of Boston. Play-rough, talk-tough Patrick Kenzie and smart, feisty Angie Gennaro don't take no lip from nobody when they're on a hot case, and their latest is hot all right. When two well-known U.S. senators ask Patrick and Angie to recover some confidential documents they believe were stolen from their office by cleaning woman Jenna Angeline, the detectives think their job will be a piece of cake: find the woman, tell the senators where she is, and let them take it from there. But of course, the case isn't that easy, and before they're finished, Patrick and Angie tackle gang warfare, corruption, prostitution, blackmail, and murder. Lehane offers slick, hip, sparkling dialogue that's as good as it gets, a plot that rockets along at warp speed, and the wonderfully original, in-your-face crime-solving duo of Kenzie and Dimassi. A terrific first novel and, one hopes, the beginning of a superb series.