Sacred (Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro Series #3)

Chapter One\ \ \ A piece of advice: If you ever follow someone in my neighborhood, don't wear pink.\ The first day Angie and I picked up the little round guy on our tail, he wore a pink shirt under a gray suit and a black topcoat. The suit was double-breasted, Italian, and too nice for my part of town by several hundred dollars. The topcoat was cashmere. People in my neighborhood could afford cashmere, I suppose, but usually they spend so much on the duct tape that keeps their tail pipes attached to their '82 Chevys, that they don't have much left over for anything but that trip to Aruba.\ The second day, the little round guy replaced the pink shirt with a more subdued white, lost the cashmere and the Italian suit, but still stuck out like Michael Jackson in a day care center by wearing a hat. Nobody in my neighborhood--or any of Boston's inner-city neighborhoods that I know of--wears anything on their head but a baseball cap or the occasional tweed Scally. And our friend, the Weeble, as we'd come to call him, wore a bowler. A fine-looking bowler, don't get me wrong, but a bowler just the same.\ "He could be an alien," Angie said.\ I looked out the window of the Avenue Coffee\ Shop. The Weeble's head jerked and then he bent to fiddle with his shoelaces.\ "An alien," I said. "From where exactly? France?"\ She frowned at me and lathered cream cheese over a bagel so strong with onions my eyes watered just looking at it. "No, stupid. From the future. Didn't you ever see that old Star Trek where Kirk and Spock ended up on earth in the thirties and were hopelessly out of step?"\ "I hate Star Trek."\ "But you're familiar with the concept."\ I nodded, then yawned. The Weeble studied a telephone pole as if he'd never seen one before. Maybe Angie was right.\ "How can you not like Star Trek?" Angie said.\ "Easy. I watch it, it annoys me, I turn it off."\ "Even Next Generation?"\ "What's that?" I said.\ "When you were born," she said, "I bet your father held you up to your mother and said, 'Look, hon, you just gave birth to a beautiful crabby old man.'\ "What's your point?" I said.\ \ \ \ The third day, we decided to have a little fun. When we got up in the morning and left my house, Angie went north and I went south.\ And the Weeble followed her.\ But Lurch followed me.\ I'd never seen Lurch before, and it's possible I never would have if the Weeble hadn't given me reason to look for him.\ Before we left the house, I'd dug through a box of summer stuff and found a pair of sunglasses I use when the weather's nice enough to ride my bicycle. The glasses had a small mirror attached to the left side of the frame that could be swung up and out so that you could see behind you. Not quite as cool as the equipment Q gave Bond, but it would do, and I didn't have to flirt with Ms. Moneypenny to get it.\ An eye in the back of my head, and I bet I was the first kid on my block to have one, too.\ I saw Lurch when I stopped abruptly at the entrance of Patty's Pantry for my morning cup of coffee. I stared at the door as if it held a menu and swung the mirror out and rotated my head until I noticed the guy who looked like a mortician on the other side of the avenue by Pat Jay's Pharmacy. He stood with his arms crossed over his sparrow's chest, watching the back of my head openly. Furrows were cut like rivers in his sunken cheeks, and a widow's peak began halfway up his forehead.\ In Patty's, I swung the mirror back against the frame and ordered my coffee.\ "You go blind all a sudden, Patrick?"\ I looked up at Johnny Deegan as he poured cream into my coffee. "What?"\ "The sunglasses," he said. "I mean, it's, what, middle of March and no one's seen the sun since Thanksgiving. You go blind, or you just trying to look hipper'n shit?"\ "Just trying to look hipper'n shit, Johnny."\ He slid my coffee across the counter, took my money.\ "It ain't working," he said.\ \ \ \ Out on the avenue, I stared through my sunglasses at Lurch as he brushed some lint off his knee then bent to tic his shoelaces just like the Weeble had the day before.\ I took off my sunglasses, thinking of Johnny Deegan. Bond was cool, sure, but he never had to walk into Patty's Pantry. Hell, just try and order a vodka martini in this neighborhood. Shaken or stiffed, your ass was going out a window.\ I crossed the avenue as Lurch concentrated on his shoelace.\ "Hi," I said.\ He straightened, looked around as if someone had called his name from down the block.\ "Hi," I said again and offered my hand.\ He looked at it, looked down the avenue again.\ "Wow," I said, "you can't tail someone for shit but at least your social skills are honed to the quick."\ His head turned as slowly as the earth on its axis until his dark pebble eyes met mine. He had to look down to do it, too, the shadow of his skeletal head puddling down my face and spreading across my shoulders. And I'm not a short guy.\ "Are we acquainted, sir?" His voice sounded as if it were due back at the coffin any moment.\ "Sure, we're acquainted," I said. "You're Lurch." I looked up and down the avenue. "Where's Cousin It, Lurch?"\ "You're not nearly as amusing as you think you are, sir."\ Sacred. Copyright © by Dennis Lehane. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

\ PeopleMenace charges the atmosphere of this crackling thriller.\ \ \ \ \ New York Times Book ReviewLively and entertaining . . . Driven by a fast-paced, twisting plot.\ \ \ Boston Sunday GlobeHis thriller grabs us with its blunt talk and breathtaking pace, but what leaves a lasting impression is the brooding authenticity of its atmosphere.\ \ \ \ \ San Francisco Examiner & ChronicleFor an utterly relentless yet ultimately affirming examination of urban malaise and anxiety, look no further than Dennis Lehane's searing debut.\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklySharp verbal patter, a noirish kind of good/bad girl and a dying and quite possibly sinister old man all enliven this third stellar effort from the author of the Shamus Award-winning A Drink Before the War and Darkness, Take My Hand. PI Angela Gennaro lost her husband, and her partner, Patrick Kenzie, lost much of the skin from his face in their last outing. Now the Boston-based sleuthing partners are recovering nicely, slowly succumbing to a mutual attraction and searching for a missing girl. Billionaire Trevor Stone, dying of cancer, hires Patrick and Angie to find his daughter Desiree only after his first choice, Jay Becker, who was Patrick's mentor, disappeared during his quest for Desiree. The young woman was last seen at the highly questionable Grief Release Inc., getting over the year-old murder of her mother and hanging out with Sean Price. After Price ripped off the group, Desiree vanished with him. Is Trevor on the level? Is Desiree a wounded angel or something else entirely? While following the trail, Angie and Patrick emerge, in Patrick's smart and often funny narration, as boldly sketched characters who leap fully formed from the pages. For most of the novel, the punishing pace and internal plot logic perform in perfect tandem. Only Desiree's long-delayed entrance and an over-the-top ending are jarring. In all other respects, Lehane proves he belongs in the big leagues with another gritty and surpassingly entertaining mystery. Major ad/promo; 13-city author tour. (Aug.)\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalWhen detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are kidnapped by dying billionaire Trevor Stone and forced to find his lost daughter, they become entwined in a vicious whodunit in which "up is down and north is south." The case takes them to Grief Release Inc., a Boston-area church/cult whose members purge their sins, secrets, and financial records; then, accompanied by Stone's henchmen, to Tampa, Florida, where a top-of-the-line sports car and all the money they can spend are put at their disposal. Kenzie and Gennaro ditch it all to continue the search on instinct in a cheap convertible. When the detectives finally find their prize, the perfecto, leggy Desiree Stone, she turns out to be much more than they bargained for. With its fast-paced plot, Lehane's (Darkness, Take My Hand, LJ 7/96) newest will be a winner with adventure buffs. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/97.]Ahmad Wright, "Library Journal"\ \ \ \ \ School Library JournalYADying billionaire Trevor Stone has his thugs kidnap sleuths Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro and bring them to his mansion so he can hire them to find his missing daughter, Desire. She is supposedly grief-stricken over the death of her mother and the impending death of her father but it becomes clear that she may not be the sweet and beautiful daughter her father describes. Patrick's mentor, Jay Becker, was the first investigator on the case but he has also disappeared. Patrick and Angie follow the trail to Florida after a brief encounter with a group of religious swindlers who may be involved with the disappearances. Every person they meet adds more confusion and conflicting information to the puzzling case. The intricate mystery of the changing identity of Desire, dangerous car chases, bloody shoot-outs, and the humorous dialogue between Patrick and Angie, all with subtle romantic overtones, will keep YAs happily turning pages.Katherine Fitch, Lake Braddock Middle School, Burke, VA\ \ \ \ \ MurrinSacred has some nice plot surprises, a large body count and a wickedly satisfying villain comeuppance. \ — Paper Magazine\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsThe kidnapping really should have tipped them off. You can't have much of a relationship with a client who grabs you off the street, drugs you, and ties you to a couple of chairs while he makes his pitch. But dying billionaire Trevor Stone, whose wife is dead and whose daughter has disappeared, is obviously a man in pain, and the $50,000 retainer he offers (plus $200,000 for expenses) goes a long way to soften the insult. So Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, his partner, friend, and sometime lover, agree to follow Patrick's vanished mentor Jay Becker into the darkness surrounding beautiful, depressed Desiree Stone, and soon—with only a brief intermission for a lovely farewell bash for their prison-bound buddy Bubba Rogowski—they're tangling with fraudulent grief counselors, a clever and vindictive IRS computer geek, and the Church of Truth and Revelation. And that's only the beginning, since the trail of Desiree's last known companion leads to Tampa, where the serious corpses will start to pile up, and where they'll finally get an inkling of the true relationship between their megalomaniac client and his anaconda-like daughter, "a Noël Coward play that had been rewritten by Sam Shepard." Lehane's barn-burning third novel (Darkness, Take My Hand, 1996, etc.) packs enough beatings, betrayals, unmaskings, resurrections, smart talk, and untrustworthy people for the most jaded palate. If you haven't discovered this gifted newcomer yet, you'd better hurry before his ship of fools and knaves casts off without you.\ \