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What it argues
A four-year-old girl named Amanda McCready has gone missing from a Dorchester apartment while her mother, Helene, was out at a bar. Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro — private investigators who know the neighborhood in ways the Boston PD does not — are hired to find her. What they find over the course of the investigation rewrites the question entirely: not just where Amanda is, but whether finding her is the right thing to do.
The novel is a procedural in the first half and a moral catastrophe in the second. Lehane uses the missing-child investigation to probe the specific failure of certain adults to be adequate parents, the specific way poverty and addiction are visited on children, and the specific temptation to decide for someone else that you know better than their life allows. The ending asks a question the novel does not answer — and then makes Patrick answer it anyway, in a choice that divides readers sharply.
What it gets right
- 1.
The central moral question — whether to rescue a child from her biological mother into a better life, or return her to her right to her own life — is not resolved. The novel earns the right to leave it open.
- 2.
Helene McCready is not a monster; she is a specific kind of neglectful parent that the novel insists on rendering with something like accuracy rather than contempt.
- 3.
Patrick Kenzie's final decision is the action of a man choosing principle over consequences, and the last pages ask whether principle is sufficient when consequences are this real.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Dennis Lehane grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and his Boston neighborhood is the setting of most of his fiction. He is the author of the Patrick Kenzie/Angela Gennaro series, beginning with A Drink Before the War (1994), and several standalone novels including Shutter Island and The Given Day. Mystic River won the Anthony and Barry Awards. Lehane has written for The Wire and Boardwalk Empire and is among the most critically admired crime writers of his generation.
