SACRED
By Dennis Lehane

Michael Connelly, author of The Poet and Concrete Blonde:

Dennis Lehane is the heir apparent. You read his stuff and you think he's got the great ones—Chandler, MacDonald, Parker—watching over him as he writes every page. But his voice is an original. He turns the hard-boiled detective novel into an elegiac treatise on the corruption of the soul. With the wonderfully written SACRED he shows that he gets better each time out.

Andre Dubus, author of Dancing After Hours and Broken Vessels:

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro have become friends of mine; they could carry a story that did not have one crime in it. Young Lehane is rapidly climbing the mountain of detective fiction upon whose peak rests James Lee Burke.

Kirkus:

The 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 Noel Coward play that had been rewritten by Sam Shepard."
    Lehane's barn-burning third novel 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.

Publishers Weekly:

Sharp 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.

Library Journal:

When 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 newest will be a winner with adventure buffs.