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Reading “Darkness, Take My Hand”
Had “Darkness, Take My Hand”
Of course, had the plot of the second book not picked up significantly about halfway through, I don’t know when book three would have hit my reading list.
It’s ok to have a case without rooting it deep within your character’s personal histories. As readers and viewers of any story, we want to experience the world these characters inhabit but you should insult your audience with stories contrived to make us believe the entire universe revolves around those characters.
But… Ok, if you’re going to do it, I suppose, this time, at least, it was done pretty well.
I figured out who the mystery guy was before the big reveal, but I think, as readers, we were meant to figure it out ahead of the characters. Once the story got to that point it was obvious because deep down, that wasn’t the mystery.
Between books one and two, Patrick started up a new relationship, and it was the few pages of his frantic sprint over the icy streets of Boston when she was in danger that had me more on the edge of my seat then the ultimate conclusion to the case itself.
With that in mind, maybe I was wrong about this book. Maybe I was wrong about what the real story was? The reason I picked up the ‘Kenzie & Gennaro’ series in the first place was to experience Lehane’s Boston through his characters. The real story in “Darkness, Take My Hand” was the fallout of those decisions that Patrick and Angie had made in the previous book and how it affected both differently. Perhaps the story wasn’t about hunting a killer, but learning to accept and move past those choices Patrick and Angie made and must continue to make to survive in their line of work. Otherwise, they would allow themselves to be consumed entirely by it, as many of the characters ultimately were.
It’s actually a quote from “A Drink Before the War”
“It never works that way. Once that ugliness has been forced into you, it becomes part of your blood, dilutes it, races through your heart and back out again, staining everything as it goes. The ugliness never goes away, never comes out, no matter what you do. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive. All you can do is hope to control it.”
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Reading “A Drink Before the War”
Early on Dennis Lehane writes, “It’s a place where the people are grateful for the seasons, because at least they confirm that time is actually moving on.” After reading the book, I’m not sure time has moved on, not for the Boston of his novels and not for the world we find ourselves living in today.
As a reader, I opened 
That much I’d been told to expect about reading Dennis Lehane.
I’d watched Mystic River
I found what I was looking for, enough that I’ve already started the second in the ‘Kenzie & Gennaro’ series, “Darkness, Take My Hand”
What I didn’t expect (and seems to be a pattern now after the correlations to the Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil) was how current some of the subject matter would still be twenty years after it was written.
“A Drink Before the War” was originally published just a couple years after the 1992 riots in Los Angeles that erupted after the Rodney King verdict. Lehane referenced the riots but also went into great detail in describing the racism and segregation that was woven into the fabric of the Boston neighborhoods he wrote about. So much of what drives his characters throughout the book is directly tied into race and the anger and violence that are reactions to the clearly divided worlds.
It’s terrifying to read a book written twenty years ago which was so firmly rooted in its present day and realize that it could just as easily have been written today.
Change every mention of Los Angeles to Ferguson or Baltimore, and make every reference of Rodney King instead about Michael Brown or Freddie Gray, or any of the growing number of black men being beaten or killed by police who are not held accountable. And then, as you continue to read, and it makes you sick that nothing has changed and by how familiar it all sounds, imagine what it must be like for the people trapped in that world.
“You hear it most when politicians who live in places like Hyannis Port and Beacon Hill and Wellesley make decisions that affect people who live in Dorchester and Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, and then step back and say there isn’t a war going on. There is a war going on. It’s happening in playgrounds, not health clubs… And as long as it doesn’t push through the heavy oak doors where they fight with prep school educations and filibusters and two-martini lunches, it will never actually exist.”
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Gas Station Burrito 