Prayers for Rain is Dennis Lehane's fifth installment in his intricately plotted, beautifully written, and much underacknowledged Boston mystery series. Lehane's books reflect our morally complex times, when the borders between right and wrong are somewhat blurry.

Private investigator Patrick Kenzie is in the middle of a personal crisis--he's lost his passion for the profession, and is tired of people with their "predictable vices, their predictable needs and wants and dormant desires." Angie Gennaro, his occasional sweetheart, lifelong friend, and fellow investigator has quit the business. She's still deeply resentful about Patrick's handling of the Amanda McCready case, the focus of Gone, Baby, Gone. Without Angie, private investigating has lost its fizz.

The suicide of a former client, Karen Nichols, gives Kenzie his investigative itch back. Six months earlier, Kenzie tracked down a stalker who had been harassing Nichols, and put an end to his heinous hobby. But Nichols needed more help than this PI could ever have imagined. "She'd been drowning, and I'd been busy." The successful, middle-class young woman had been sinking into a sea of drugs, alcohol, and prostitution, hitting the bottom when she jumped from the Boston Custom House. Her death consumes Kenzie--he is convinced that someone pulled her into the vortex, although her nearest and dearest simply call her weak.

Kenzie teams up with his explosive, loving, gun-toting friend Bubba Rogowski, and, after a boozy reunion, Angie Gennaro joins them. This fearless threesome must surely be the most original team in contemporary crime fiction. Good at the core--but seriously screwed up by various demons from their pasts--tact and decorum is hardly their style. They work their way across Boston, doing whatever it takes to question Nichols's family and acquaintances. By unveiling the real Nichols, tragic family secrets, betrayals, and conspiracies are also unmasked.

If you haven't experienced Dennis Lehane's world before, be prepared for an invigorating new reading experience. --Naomi Gesinger


From Publishers Weekly
After the shattering consequences of their last case (Gone, Baby, Gone), Lehane's PI partners Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are back, but not together. Estranged from Angie personally and professionally, Patrick works the old Boston neighborhoodAwith the occasional help of his loyal and happily homicidal pal Bubba RogowskiAwhile Angie has moved uptown to a blue-chip corporate security firm. Enter Karen Nichols, a nice, hard-working sort who's being stalked. Patrick and Bubba are glad to take care of the stalkerAin an extremely satisfying wayAand everybody expects a happy ending. Which no one gets, because six months later the woman dives to her death off the Custom House tower. It turns out that everything that could go wrong with her life didAall at the same time. Everyone, including the policeAand Karen's strangely unsympathetic familyAchalks it up to a streak of extraordinarily bad luck, but Patrick is suspicious. He doesn't believe in coincidences and needs Angie's help to uncover a killer whose methods seem to put him beyond the lawAone who makes his victims do the work, by manipulating their minds and lives until suicide seems a plausible alternative. Lehane's sense of place is acute, and his ear is finely attuned to the voices of Boston's many neighborhoods, as Patrick and Angie trace Karen's downward spiral, from the exclusive, cobbled streets of Beacon Hill to the wharves and bars of the North End. As the plot twists through layers of old deceit and current corruption, the victims multiply while the killer remains elusive, protected by the terror he inspires. With sharp dialogue, inventively gruesome violence and the darkest of dark humor, Lehane's fifth novel proves again that he's the hippest heir of Hammett and Chandler. Author tour. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
This gritty tale of identity, innocence and psychological warfare is endowed with the local flavor of Boston and its environs. Thomas J.S. Brown manages the task with aplomb, seamlessly switching from Patrick Kenzie's tough-edged Dorchester accent to the out-of-control, delightfully simple voice of Bubba Rogowski, Kenzie's sociopathic sidekick and guardian angel. The story has the listener laughing out loud one moment, stifling tears the next. Brown's mastery of timing, understanding of the characters, and down-to-earth voice carry the listener through a moving story. S.E.S. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Karen Nichols is being stalked, and private investigator Patrick Kenzie learns the guy has a history of rape and sexual assault; in all cases, charges were dropped. Patrick and his arms-dealer pal Bubba Rogowski pay the stalker a visit and permanently--they believe--dissuade him from pursuing Nichols. Then Patrick learns that the very proper Nichols stripped naked and jumped to her death from a Boston landmark. Feeling guilty, Patrick, Bubba, and Patrick's former partner, Angie Gennaro, uncover the elaborate scheme that destroyed Nichols. This fifth Kenzie-Gennaro novel again features well-armed heroes who exact their own brand of vigilante justice in a Boston where the police are inept and/or helpless. As in all the best hard-boiled series, each entry reveals more about the principal characters and their relationships in a violent, uncaring world where the only verities are the ones you establish for yourself and defend vigorously. Lehane has worked his way into the top echelon of crime writers. Wes Lukowsky


From Kirkus Reviews
Karen Nichols's slow slide to self-destruction begins a few weeks after shamus Patrick Kenzie and his fearsome sidekick Bubba Rogowski gently discourage predatory restauranteur Cody Falk from hitting on her anymore. Her fianc gets struck by a car; she loses her job and her apartment, replacing them with drinking and drugs; and she ends her final incarnation as a prostitute by taking a header off the observation deck of Boston's Custom House. Fans of quixotic Patrick's first four cases (Gone, Baby, Gone, 1998, etc.) will recognize Karen's death as the signal for him to do some serious hunkering down. But every time he and Bubba, joined eventually by his estranged lover and ex-partner Angela Gennaro, get a promising lead about the plot that drove Karen to suicide, they hear the sound of doors slamming. Either Karen's friends and family don't know anything about the shadow that fell across her life or they're afraid to talk about it, and the sequel shows that their fears aren't in vain. But by the time the avengers lay down their arms, Karen's life from childhood on will be an open book; the scoundrels who plotted against her (and there turn out to be plenty of them, coming at Patrick in dazzling waves) will be dead or defanged; and Lehane, who writes like an angel on crystal meth, will have tapped into your most primitive fantasies of vigilante justice. It's all a fairy tale, as Patrick finally realizes. But as fairy tales go, what a scorcher! (First printing 60,000; Literary Guild main selection) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

P.I.'s Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro team up once again for the intense Prayers for Rain. Their new task: Catch an evil manipulator whose modus operandi, which doesn't involve a gun or a knife, leaves his victims quite dead nonetheless. See, this madman doesn't do the killing himself: He mercilessly coaxes his victims into killing themselves.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Patrick first meets Karen Nichols, she strikes him as the kind of woman who irons her socks — an innocent from a protected upbringing, untouched by tragedy. But six months later Karen commits suicide by leaping from one of Boston's most cherished monuments. Patrick finds himself wondering what can alter someone so drastically, so quickly, that suicide seems her only option. Yet what begins as idle curiosity soon becomes obsessive as Patrick suspects that the tragic events that befell Karen during the last months of her life — an "accident" that destroyed her fiance; the loss of her job, her apartment, and eventually her mind — may not have been as random as they first appeared. Enlisting the aid of his ex-partner and ex-flame, Angela Gennaro, as well as that of his friend, the lethally unbalanced Bubba Rogowski, Patrick enters into a treacherous game of cat-and-mouse with a man who, instead of merely killing his victims, prefers to make them wish they were dead. As the stakes grow higher and more personal, they find they might be fighting a losing battle — against an enemy the law can't touch, who is always one step ahead of them, who is gradually learning their weaknesses, their loves, and is determined to tear their worlds apart.

FROM THE CRITICS

Chicago Tribune

To the list that includes such names as Robert B. Parker and Linda Barnes, add that of Dennis Lehane.

Stephen King

In the miserably hot summer of 1999...the superb detective novels of Dennis Lehane—became a kind of lifeline for me. —The New York Times Book Review

Wall Street Journal

When it comes to describing action, Lehane delivers big-time.

New York Times Book Review

The well-oiled plot mechanics, edge-of-the-knife dialogue and explosive bursts of violence are polished and primed in this hard-boiled shocker.

James Sheehan - Bill Sheehan

Sometimes, you can spot them right away. In 1995, Dennis Lehane published his remarkably assured debut novel, A Drink Before the War , and it was immediately obvious that someone special had just entered the ranks of American suspense writers. A Drink Before the War demonstrated an instinctive mastery of the idiom and conventions of the traditional private-eye novel, then added some very personal elements to the mix: a sense of moral outrage; a feeling for the nuances of complex relationships; the ability to capture, with documentary precision, the blighted nature of our modern urban landscapes; and an unsparing vision of a violent and corrupt society in terminal decline.

Lehane's fifth novel, Prayers for Rain , is now available, and it operates at the same level of intensity that characterized the other four, each of which featured the same pair of Boston-based private investigators, Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. Prayers for Rain P takes place several months after the bleak conclusion of Gone, Baby, Gone , which saw Kenzie and Gennaro come to a bitter parting of the ways as a result of unresolved differences over the outcome of their latest case. As the new book opens, Gennaro has joined a large, impersonal Boston security firm, while Kenzie is working alone and growing increasingly weary of the sordid, dehumanizing nature of his profession.

When Kenzie is hired by the impossibly All-American Karen Nichols — who strikes him as "the kind of woman who irons her socks" — to confront and discourage the stalker who has recently entered her life, trouble begins. Kenzie, with the aid of the massive and intimidating Bubba Rogowski, successfully eliminates the stalker and then puts the matter out of his mind. Several weeks later, a distraught Karen Nichols leaves a barely coherent message on his answering machine, begging Kenzie to call her. For a number of unsatisfactory reasons, he never does. Four months later, Karen is dead, having jumped from the 26th-floor observation deck of the Boston Custom House. The rest of the novel centers around the guilt-ridden Kenzie's efforts to understand what happened to Karen and to offer whatever posthumous restitution he can.

Kenzie's investigation reveals that the last few months of Karen's life had been marked by a Job-like series of catastrophes. First, her fianc￯﾿ﾽ was left permanently comatose by what appeared to be a freak automobile accident. In the aftermath of that accident, everything fell apart. Karen lost her job, her car, her apartment, and her savings, ending her days in a miasma of drugs, despair, and meaningless sex. As Kenzie assembles this unsettling portrait of a woman driven to the edge, he begins to discern the outline of another figure, someone who, for reasons of his own, deliberately set in motion the series of events that robbed Karen Nichols of her will to live.

The bulk of Prayers for Rain concerns Kenzie's (and, eventually, Angela Gennaro's) attempts to identify the predator, understand his motives, and bring him to some sort of justice. The result is a stylish, frightening, furiously paced novel of suspense and psychological warfare that moves through escalating levels of violence toward a bruising confrontation in an underground bunker near Plymouth Rock, a confrontation from which no one emerges unaltered or unscarred.

Beneath its lurid, take-it-to-the-limit surface, Prayers for Rain is powered by Lehane's sympathy for the violated and abused, and by his understanding of the fragile nature of the things that anchor us to a sane and reasonable life. With five novels under his belt, Lehane, who is still in his early 30s, has established a legitimate claim as the best new writer to enter the field in the last ten years, and his future, at this point, seems virtually unlimited. If you haven't tried his work yet, I urge you to do so. He's very, very good, and he's going to be very, very popular. Sometimes, you can spot that right away.
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