Author of the week: Dennis Lehane
In Moonlight Mile, Lehane returns to private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro and the kidnapped child, Amanda McCready, who were last seen in Gone, Baby, Gone.
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.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.