RARA-AVIS: Lehane's _Sacred_

William Denton (buff@vex.net)
Mon, 11 May 1998 23:56:03 -0400 (EDT) There have been a few mentions of Dennis Lehane on here, and perhaps
some others have read his latest paperback, _Sacred_. (I think
there's a new hardcover already out.)

This is the weakest of the three I've read, and the furthest from the
modern hardboiled kind of thing he does. Hardboiled detectives are
supposed to be tough and cynical and crack wise, but Patrick Kenzie
(the narrator) has turned into a smart ass. Come to think of it, with
all the one-line paragraphs, he's getting more like Fletch. Kenzie
and his partner Angie Gennaro are tough, that's for sure, but they
need to drop the shtick.

The storyline didn't do much for me, and there are times when Lehane
seems to have written himself into a corner so he just makes something
up to get out. And how someone can kill a person in a highway
shoot-out and then waltz out of the police station, I don't know.

Michael Connelly blurbs the book and says, "He turns the hard-boiled
detective novel into an elegaic treatise on the corruption of the
soul." "Elegaic" is not a word I'd use, and Chandler or Ellroy do a
much better job with corruption. I'm in no rush to read the next
Lehane for a number of reasons, but the smart-alecky tone is the big
one. He's taken cracking wise and pushed it into sitcom territory.

Bill

-- 
William Denton | Toronto, Canada | http://www.vex.net/~buff/ | Caveat lector.
            "Let's keep the party polite."

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