A Drink Before the War

In the continuing series I call 'Gallagan's bookshelf', next up was a Dennis Lehane two-parter. I only read A Drink Before the War here- Darkness, Take My Hand will have to wait for another day. Drink is Lehane's first overall book and also first in the Kenzie-Gennaro series. If those names sounds familiar, they were also the protagonists of his later book Gone, Baby, Gone which of course eventually became that Ben Affleck movie. But back to Lehane. Frankly, the guy can just flat-out write a great crime novel (he co-wrote some episodes of The Wire, which should earn him some cred on this blog). What starts out as a routine missing persons case for private investigators Kenzie and Gennaro quickly leads them into the midst of a gang war in our very own Roxbury Massachusetts. Most of the action takes place in the seedier neighborhoods outside Boston proper- Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester, Southie- and it's no coincidence, as Lehane really wanted to nail down the disconnect between these poorer neighborhoods and the more affluent streets of Boston. There's physical violence in the streets, but the true villains here are the politicians- their class and racial warfare in turn keep gang warfare going. Towards the end there was a rather startling reveal that seemed a bit too over-the-top by this book's standards, but other than that A Drink Before the War remained a tight book that never wasted my time- much like ol' 52 Pickup, the action starts on page 1 and really doesn't let up til the last page (er, middle page in a 2-parter I guess).