Gone, Baby, Gone by Dennis Lehane

Gone, baby, gone by Dennis Lehane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Boston private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to find four-year-old Amanda McCready, abducted from her bed on a warm, summer night. They meet her stoned-out, strangely apathetic mother, her loving aunt and uncle, the mother's dangerous, drug-addled friends, and two cops who've found so many abused or dead children they may be too far over the edge to come back. Despite enormous public attention, rabid news coverage, and dogged police work, the investigation repeatedly hits a brick wall. 

Led into a world of drug dealers, child molesters, and merciless executioners, Patrick and Angie are soon forced to face not only the horrors adults can perpetrate on innocents but also their own conflicted feelings about what is best, and worst, when it comes to raising children. And as the Indian summer fades and the autumn chill deepens, Amanda McCready stays gone, banished so completely that she seems never to have existed.

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In Gone, Baby, Gone you really get a taste of darkness and an overdose of evil. I finished the book a couple of weeks ago but this was a book that actually was so awful to read, the first Lehane book I had to read in phases, not right through because it was sometimes too awful to read. I also waited a while to write the review. Sometimes dwelling in darkness isn’t that nice and after Gone, Baby, Gone I just wanted to read easy things and watch fun things on tv.

Rating the book was also hard. I gave the book 4.5 stars after I finished the book, but after thinking it through these weeks after finish the book I've decided to give the 4 instead, knock off a half star more. I found the book too dark and disturbing for my taste. I hate reading books when children get hurt and for instance, the pedophile part of the books was horrific.

I have more Lehane books to read, but for the moment I will read another kind of books. Books with hopefully happy endings…