Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"For four hours, she'd sat up there, twenty-six stories above blue cement, and considered whether she'd go through with it or not. [...] At what moment had it all crystallized to the point where she'd hoisted her legs over that four-foot balcony wall and stepped into black space?"

Another disappointment and all so typical! An author whom I know from at least one good book in the past, interesting setup of the plot, realistic characters, skillful writing, all so promising until... At some point the novel begins to deteriorate to the extent that I barely have the patience to continue reading. Dennis Lehane's Prayers for Rain (1999) is a good example of the phenomenon. I very much liked A Drink Before the War that I had read over 20 years ago. That was the novel that began the Kenzie/Gennaro series of which Prayers is the fifth installment. The current novel is a well-structured, well-written, and captivating book until about one third into the story. Then the clichés of the genre take over and the plot loses its grip over the reader. Things get much worse about two-thirds into the novel: quality deteriorates to the degree that I have just been able to skim the pages to see if anything can hold my attention. A promising book turns into the dreaded page-turner: mob clichés, gun clichés, character clichés abound. The plot twists are implausible and just plain silly.

A brief synopsis of the setup: Kenzie and Gennaro are not together as a consequence of events from a previous installment. Karen Nichols, a young woman who is being stalked, hires Kenzie to convince the stalker to "lay off her." When the detective and his cliché sidekick Bubba Rogowski administer heavy corporal therapy to the offender, he promises to stop harassing Karen. Yet six months later, she jumps to her death from the observatory deck of a sky scraper. Kenzie is devastated: he feels heavy guilt - several weeks before her death Karen tried to call him and he was too busy to return her call.

The first third of the novel, maybe even a half, reads like real literature, well-written, and captivating. Karen Nichols emerges a fully realistic, tragic character, with all the usual human frailties and complexities. The unforgettable, well-written conversation between Kenzie and Karen's mother and stepfather makes it hard not to get angry at the degree of harm that parents can do to their children. The scene reminded me of some of the virtuoso dialogues in Denise Mina's novels. Yet the good stuff is balanced by gratuitous scenes of violence and brutality:

"[He] no longer had possession of his own hands. They were on the floor to the left of the silent motor, chopped off above the wrists and neatly laid, palms down, on the floorboards."

I will not mention what else was done to the victim who was carefully kept alive during the amateur surgery, read the book if you are into pornography of torture.

The beginning of the novel was evidently written by a good author. The ending could have as well be written by me or generated by a computer. I have not heard about mystery authors hiring ghostwriters to finish their novels, but I know nothing about the business of mystery literature. "Hook the reader on the beginning and then who cares about the rest," may well be the best business plan.

Two stars.


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