Tome: Gone Baby Gone

The bare skeleton of any good work of crime fiction is a case that requires solving.

What adds flesh and skin to this skeletal frame is the nature of the case, the myriad twists and turns it takes whikle snaking it's way to a jaw dropping finale.

But to give any tale of this genre some form, some unique musculature, that sets it apart as a specimen to be absorbed and admired, you need to layer it with atmosphere, taut, foreboding and menacing, inducing a sense of unease, a feeling of dread at what's about to unfold even as you tear through the pages to get there with all possible haste.

Dennis Lehane's fourth book featuring private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro is a dark, violent look at the world of abducted children.

A world where "twenty three hundred children are reported missing every day, where "three hundred children disappear every year and never return"

A wold populated by sadistic paedophiles like Leon and Roberta Trett, who kidnap, handcuff, flog and sodomize children before killing them by slitting their throats.

In this world, mothers like Helene McReady, high school dropout, trailer park trash, recipient of three abortions, drug dealer and user, decides to have a child not because she's ready or capable enough to raise one, but to fill a void in an existence devoid of purpose, direction or meaning.

When Helene's 4 year old daughter, Amanda, goes missing, Kenzie and Gennaro are hired by Helene's brother Lionel and wife Beatrice and reluctantly accept the case.

Partnered with Poole and Broussard, 2 detectives from the CAC (Crimes Against Children) unit, Kenzie and Gennaro trawl the drug dens and dive bars of Boston in search of Amanda, an endeavour that proves increasingly complicated when Poole, Broussard and even Lionel may be harbouring hidden agendas of their own.

Even those familiar with Mystic River, Lehane's dark tale of misguided retribution and the shocking finale to his prison drama, Shutter Island, may well feel like showering after crawling through the subterranean underbelly of Lehane's Boston in this book.

Lehane's muscular prose is tender enough to masterfully evoke haunting melancholia as he describes the impact of a missing child on society:

" When a child disappears, the space she'd occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And those people-relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print-create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task.

But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It's a silence that's two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed"

Kenzie and Gennaro have a sexually charged chemistry that spark off the pages. Partners and lovers, they contemplate bringing a child into a world that is "cement cold and jaggedly sharp".

"The world was filled with monsters who'd once been babies, who'd started as zygotes in the womb,who emerged from woman in the only miracle the world has left, yet emerged angry or twisted or destined to be so"

It's this subtext, coupled with a colorful cast of supporting characters and a plot crackling with tension and whiplash twists, that make Gone Baby Gone a superlative effort in the genre.

Dark, moody and disturbingly current, Gone Baby Gone is a bitter brew, but if you're tired of diluted thrillers, a swig of this murky concoction is a must.