Gone, Baby, Gone
Dennis Lehane · first published 1998 · ISBN 9781590864593
Detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro search for a missing four-year-old in working-class Boston. The case forces them into neighborhoods where family loyalty, revenge, police corruption, and the choices between official justice and street justice become impossible to separate.
On our lists
The Best Crime Novels of the 1990s
Lehane demonstrates how much emotional and moral complexity can fit inside a tightly constructed mystery. Gone, Baby, Gone works as procedural, as study of a marriage under pressure, and as meditation on what justice actually means when the system fails. The Boston setting becomes inseparable from character and plot.