Authors > Dennis Lehane

A Drink Before the War

As richly complex and brutal as the terrain it depicts, here is the mesmerizing, darkly original novel that heralded the arrival of Dennis Lehane, the master of the new noir--and introduced Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, his smart and tough private investigators weaned on the blue-collar streets of Dorchester.

Year: 1994
Genre: Hardboiled, Private Eye

Darkness, Take My Hand

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro's latest client is a prominent Boston psychiatrist, running scared from a vengeful Irish mob. The private investigators know about cold-blooded retribution. Born and bred on the mean streets of blue-collar Dorchester, they've seen the darkness that lives in the hearts of the unfortunate.

Year: 1996
Genre: Hardboiled, Private Eye

Gone, Baby, Gone

The tough neighborhood of Dorchester is no place for the innocent or the weak. Now, one of its youngest is missing. Private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro don't want the case. But after pleas from the child's aunt, they open an investigation that will ultimately risk everything--their relationship, their sanity, and even their lives--to find a little girl lost.

Year: 1998
Genre: Hardboiled, Missing Person, Private Eye

Live by Night

From bestselling author Dennis Lehane comes this epic, unflinching tale of the making and unmaking of a gangster in the Prohibition Era of the Roaring Twenties.

Year: 2012
Genre: 1920s

Moonlight Mile

An explosive tale of vengeance and redemption--the brilliant sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone--Moonlight Mile returns Lehane's unforgettable and deeply human detective duo to the mean streets of blue collar Boston to investigate the second disappearance of Amanda McCready, now sixteen years old.

Year: 2010
Genre: Missing Person, Private Eye

Mystic River

When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever.

Year: 2001
Genre: Psychological Thriller

Prayers for Rain

When a former client jumps naked from a Boston landmark, Private Investigator Patrick Kenzie wants to know why. Once a perky young woman in love with life, her suicide is the final fall in a spiral of self-destruction.

Year: 1999
Genre: Private Eye, Psychological Thriller

Sacred

A beautiful, grief-stricken woman has vanished without a trace. So has the detective hired to find her. And a lot of money...

Year: 1997
Genre: Hardboiled, Private Eye

Shutter Island

In the year 1954, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate an unexplained disappearance. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on the island, hints of radical experimentation and covert government machinations add darker, more sinister shades to an already bizarre case. Because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is remotely what it seems.

Year: 2003
Genre: Thriller

Since We Fell

Rachel Childs, a former journalist who, after an on-air mental breakdown, now lives as a virtual shut-in. Sucked into a conspiracy thick with deception, violence, and possibly madness, Rachel must find the strength within herself to conquer unimaginable fears and mind-altering truths.

Year: 2017
Genre: Conspiracy, Psychological Thriller

The Given Day

Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads where past meets future. Filled with a cast of richly drawn, unforgettable characters, "The Given Day" tells the story of two families--one black, one white--swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power.

Year: 2008
Genre: World War I

World Gone by

Dennis Lehane delivers a psychologically, morally complex novel of blood, crime, passion, and vengeance, set in Cuba and Ybor City, Florida, during World War II, in which Joe Coughlin must confront the cost of his criminal past and present.

Year: 2015
Genre: 1940s

Book Series
• Coughlin
• Kenzie and Gennaro