Surburban houses boast "lawns that looked like they shaved twice a day". The sardonic metaphors and similes nod to the noir masters of the past. But the trick of writing American private dick fiction this late in the day is to be post-Chandler without being sub-Chandler, and Lehane impressively writes within a tradition while also making it his own. The Kenzie and Gennaro books are narrated by Patrick in a battered and slangy but ultimately moral tone that consciously echoes Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. In a classic crime device, the plot involves the solution to a riddle: "Five people walked into a room, two died, but four walked out." This is a different kind of disappearance, over which she might have more control, but she is still too young to vanish with impunity, and the explanation of her latest departure painfully confronts Patrick and Angie with the consequences of their earlier decision. In the sequel, Amanda, now 16, goes missing for a second time. Gone, Baby, Gone turned on the disappearance of a four-year-old girl, Amanda McCready, whose case gave the investigators an exquisite moral dilemma typical of this writer's fiction: should Amanda, discovered in the care of a loving but illegal couple, be returned to the custody of her abusive and neglectful natural mother? After an 11-year gap in which he worked on one-off novels, Lehane revisits these characters in Moonlight Mile, and the resumption of the sequence makes thematic use of the interruption.
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