Lehane is a storytelling genius. Elmore Leonard would have been proud to write this.

It’s so real, and so vivid. Lehane can create fully formed characters with a couple of sentences:

…something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman. And those two qualities cannot coexist. A broken person can’t be unbreakable. An unbreakable person can’t be broken. And yet here sits Mary Pat Fennessy, broken but unbreakable.

He’s in top form here. The book is a history lesson, a parable about modern times, and a character study of a mother with unbearable grief.

And it’s a rip roaring murder mystery and revenge story. It’s probably the best of his that I’ve read.