Reading Rainbow: "Darkness, Take My Hand" by Dennis Lehane

Darkness, Take My Hand is the second book in the series featuring Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. This was, of course, the investigative team featured in the film Gone Baby Gone, the film adaptation of the fourth book in the series. This book finds Kenzie and Gennaro still partners in business only, taking on a case referred to them by a friend. After a few uneventful weeks on the case, they remove themselves from the case believing themselves to be wasting their time and their client's money.

Soon they find themselves in the midst of a grotesque killing spree, at the mercy of a serial killer intent on inserting the two squarely in the middle of the action.

Lehane's prose is gripping and effortless. His ability to illustrate the horror of the killer's heinous acts is adept to say the least. The narrative voice of Patrick Kenzie flows forth from Lehane's pen seemingly without effort, and that voice is one with which you want to see the ride to its end. His books are intensely violent and immensely readable. It is easy to see why David Simon and Ed Burns would have wanted to enlist Lehane to their troop of novelists-cum-screenwriters, as he dives in to the murky waters of the crime-ridden streets of the Boston area with a deft hand and clear vision, often startling the reader with the extreme violence and warped pathology of the criminal mind.

But don't take my word for it...