Author of the week: Dennis Lehane

last updated 8 January 2015

It’s been 11 years since Dennis Lehane seemingly closed the door on fictional private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, said Dylan Foley in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. Gone, Baby, Gone, his fourth book about the Boston duo, ended with the partners finding a kidnapped child named Amanda, taking the girl away from a loving family, and delivering her to her drug-addicted mother. It turns out that guilt about that gig was long brewing. “Kenzie and Gennaro came to me after 10 years of silence. The voice came back to me, and I was like, ‘Okay,’” Lehane says. “As I was working on the book, it became clear that the story I should tell was the one about Amanda McCready. I thought, ‘Let’s look at that one again.’”

The resulting novel, Moonlight Mile, finds Kenzie and Gennaro loaded with both new worries and new wisdom, said Louis Peitzman in the San Francisco Chronicle. Lehane thinks he knows why Kenzie in particular started to get “blabby” again. “I don’t think it’s accidental that his sudden verbosity coincided with my becoming a father for the first time.” Whereas Baby centered on motherhood, Moonlight Mile is about being a father. This time around, Amanda disappears again, at 16, and Kenzie becomes a new father himself. “It’s about [Kenzie’s] coming to terms with a no-win decision he made.” The ending of the earlier novel, Lehane says, was intended to give “zero sense of closure,” and this one is no different. “The past can’t be changed,” he says, “only reckoned with.”