Quick review here as I am running out the door to start a week's vacation (and hopefully some major reading).
I had one more Dennis Lehane book from the drunken stumble haul and decided for completion's sake to give him another chance after my displeasure with my last read of his (Darkness, Take my Hand). At the halfway point of Prayers for Rain, I was glad I did. Here we have much more of what I was looking for, a complex investigation with interesting characters and the protagonist investigating. There is a slight dusting of dark observation on the state of the world and his own mindset, but not pages and pages of mooning. Unfortunately, at about the halfway point, most of the mystery is revealed and once again the antagonist is a highly-skilled total psycho. He wasn't quite as ridiculous as the one in Darkness, but after a while can we just not have flawed, broken characters who do a crime than over the top conspirators whose sole goal in life is to inflict creative torture and cruelty on good people? So this one was okay, sort of satisfying, definitely not 100% redemption, but not closing the door altogether either. I wonder if as the Kenzie-Gennaro novels advance, he matures more and more, gets away from the simplistic stuff and allows the good writer that he is to tell a story that doesn't have to impress you with its excess.
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