This is the second book of a series featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angie Genaro, partners in a private detective agency in a working-class section of Boston. That first book, A Drink Before the War dealt with a gang war, but Darkness, Take My Hand deal with a serial killer, and if the plot is fairly standard in that regard, this novel still stands out for style, setting and characters.
A blurb in the book compares Lehane to Chandler, MacDonald and Parker. I actually prefer Lehane to any of them. I recently read through a list of mystery recommendations that included all those authors and discovered I actually don't usually care for the hard-boiled detective genre that includes those authors, even when the author is a fine stylist. (To Chandler and MacDonald I'd add Dashiel Hammett, Walter Mosley and James Lee Burke as impressive in that regard within that genre.)
Yet with the possible exception of Hammett, you won't see me read more books by those other authors. In the end I find hard-boiled too cynical, too gritty and too many of the typical hard-boiled detectives are damn unlikable, little more than thugs. (Philip Marlowe, I'm looking at you!) And that is what sets Lehane apart. Because though the milieu Kenzie works in is dangerous, corrupt, at times bleak, there's a core of decency that runs through him, a sense of humor--and more than that--caring. The detectives of those other books are solitary, isolated and grim. But Kenzie has friends, and above all he has his partner Angie, and that makes all the difference to me. It's the humor, the way Lehane brings the mean streets of Boston to life, but above all that relationship between Angie and Patrick that will keep me reading the series.
