Dennis Lehane won a Shamus Award for
A Drink Before the War , his first book about working-class Boston detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. His second in the series,
Darkness, Take My Hand , got the kind of high octane reviews that careers are made of. Now Lehane not only survives the dreaded third-book curse, he beats it to death with a stick.
Sacred is a dark and dangerous updating of Raymond Chandler's
The Big Sleep , as dying billionaire Trevor Stone hires Kenzie and Gennaro to find his daughter, Desiree. Patrick's mentor, a wonderfully devious detective named Jay Becker, has already disappeared in St. Petersburg, Florida, while working the case, so the two head there to pick up a trail. Desiree, of course, is nothing like the sweet and simple beauty described by her father, and even Chandler would have been amazed by the plot twists that Lehane manages to keep coming.
