GONE, BABY, GONE

A hundred and fifty Boston cops are looking for four-year-old Amanda McCready, but her Aunt Beatrice and Uncle Lionel don’t think that’s enough, and they want Dorchester shamus Patrick Kenzie and his live-in partner Angela Gennaro (Sacred, 1997, etc.) to make it 152. Patrick’s not hot for the case, particularly after he meets Amanda’s mother Helene, who’s one shiftless piece of work’she parked Amanda alone while she went out drinking with a pair of friends. And once they’ve thrown in with the McCreadys, they find that Helene is only the sideshow to a ripely disgusting big top of drug dealers, pederasts, psycho-sadists, convicts who keep ruling their fiefdoms from inside the big house, and a crack police unit—Crimes Against Children—whose zealous officers don’t give an inch to the bad guys in the way of toughness, violence, or lack of scruples. Noticing a couple of details that escaped all those cops on the loose enables Patrick to contact Amanda’s kidnappers and set up a ransom drop, but it all goes horribly wrong—as does his attempt to recover a second child snatched several months later, in a case that reveals the truth to Patrick at the cost of his love life, his illusions about parenthood and the law, and his ability to sleep nights. Darkly and extravagantly imagined, full of harrowing action sequences and shamelessly emotional highs and lows nobody else would have dared to invent.