PRAYERS FOR RAIN
By Dennis Lehane

Publishers Weekly (starred review):

After the shattering consequences of their last case (GONE BABY GONE), Lehane's PI partners Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are back, but not together. Estranged from Angie personally and professionally, Patrick works the old Boston neighborhood—with the occasional help of his loyal and happily homicidal pal Bubba Rogowski—while Angie has moved uptown to a blue-chip corporate security firm. Enter Karen Nichols, a nice, hardworking sort who's being stalked. Patrick and Bubba are glad to take care of the stalker—in an extremely satisfying way—and everybody expects a happy ending. Which no one gets, because six months later the woman dives to her death off the Custom House tower. It turns out that everything that could go wrong with her life did—all at the same time. Everyone, including the police —and Karen's strangely unsympathetic family—chalks it up to a streak of extraordinarily bad luck, but Patrick is suspicious. He doesn't believe in coincidences and needs Angie's help to uncover a killer whose methods seem to put him beyond the law—one who makes his victims do the work, by manipulating their minds and lives until suicide seems a plausible alternative. Lehane's sense of place is acute, and his ear is finely attuned to the voices of Boston's many neighborhoods, as Patrick and Angie trace Karen's downward spiral, from the exclusive, cobbled streets of Beacon Hill to the wharves and bars of the North End. As the plot twists through layers of old deceit and current corruption, the victims multiply while the killer remains elusive, protected by the terror he inspires. With sharp dialogue, inventively gruesome violence and the darkest of dark humor, Lehane's fifth novel proves again that he's the hippest heir of Hammett and Chandler.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review):

Karen Nichols's slow slide to self-destruction begins a few weeks after shamus Patrick Kenzie and his fearsome sidekick Bubba Rogowski gently discourage predatory restaurateur Cody Falk from hitting on her anymore. Her fiancé gets struck by a car; she loses her job and her apartment, replacing them with drinking and drugs; and she ends her final incarnation as a prostitute by taking a header off the observation deck of Boston's Custom House. Fans of quixotic Patrick's first four cases (GONE BABY GONE 1998, etc.) will recognize Karen's death as the signal for him to do some serious hunkering down. But every time he and Bubba, joined eventually by his estranged lover and ex-partner Angela Gennaro, get a promising lead about the plot that drove Karen to suicide, they hear the sound of doors slamming. Either Karen's friends and family don't know anything about the shadow that fell across her life or they're afraid to talk about it, and the sequel shows that their fears aren't in vain. But by the time the avengers lay down their arms, Karen's life from childhood on will be an open book; the scoundrels who plotted against her (and there turn out to be plenty of them, coming at Patrick in dazzling waves) will be dead or defanged; and Lehane, who writes like an angel on crystal meth, will have tapped into your most primitive fantasies of vigilante justice. It's all a fairy tale, as Patrick finally realizes. But as fairy tales go, what a scorcher!