My sis sent me a copy of Lehane’s Moonlight Mile, which for some reason I hadn’t read, and although it’s a very good book, it left me for some reason unsatisfied, and I can’t quite put my finger on why. I might have been asking it to be a different book than it was.
Moonlight Mile came
out in 2010, which means after The Given
Day, the first of the Coughlin trilogy, and before Live by Night, the second novel, which picks up Joe Coughlin’s
story as a
I mean Lehane no offense, but of course if it were me, and he made a similar comment about something of mine, it would get my back up. We can’t know what impels a writer.
In any case, we’re revisiting unfinished business. Gone, Baby, Gone ends on an ambiguous and very uncertain note. Moonlight Mile is, quite explicitly, a reading of that moral temperature. I can’t say much about the plot, which takes off at right angles from Gone, Baby, Gone – not without giving too much away, if you’re unfamiliar with the previous book. We are back in the world of human trafficking, heartless as before, although not quite as horrific. And maybe the stakes simply don’t seem as high. There was an edge of nausea in Gone, Baby, Gone that’s just not present, here. A sense of the absolute is missing.
It’s
not too much to say that evil itself has often been Lehane’s theme. Sometimes it’s frighteningly specific, and sometimes
it’s a planetary influence, felt but unseen -
