Darkness, Take My Hand is a horrific book. It's bloody, it's nasty but it's a hell of a read.

Dennis Lehane delivers another mind-blowing story featuring detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. I'll admit it right now — I don't entirely understand what Lehane is trying to do here. There is a level of myth and self-reflexiveness to this book that I can't penetrate. The villains are driven by something deep and psychological but, even after reading the ending twice, I still can't quite figure out what it is. Maybe it's too deep for me. I have enough faith in Lehane as a writer not to doubt him, not to question whether he ever really knew the answer himself. I just can't work it out from what's given in the book.

I can't figure out the link between the villains and the two mobsters, Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy, either.

Oh well.

Kenzie and Gennaro agree to help a beautiful psychiatrist who has been receiving threats, even though they know from the beginning that the case will lead them right into the laps of the nastiest of the nasty from Boston's mob scene. When the mobsters claim innocence, however, our heroes are at a loss for where to turn next. Cruxifictions and other sorts of sadistic, ritualistic murders follow and suddenly Kenzie finds that all the leads connect to him. No, he's not a suspect, but he certainly seems to be at the centre of it all.

Kenzie, now in love with a beautiful doctor and her four-year-old daughter, struggles to protect the innocence of his new family from the violence of his chosen profession. Gennaro, finally divorced from her abusive husband, is spinning, lost. Together, they take on evil forces of the like they never in their wildest nightmares contemplated facing, aided by a flotilla of police and FBI agents.

There's blood on almost every page. And savagery. And sadism. And a little bit of sex thrown in.

Lehane starts with the briefest of chapters, a Prologue that serves as something of a frame for the story. It takes place after the story is over, as Kenzie sits alone on his balcony, watching the snow fall on a cold Christmas Eve. In this three-page passage, Lehane dials up the tension and suspense and, over the following 330 pages, he never lets up. Here are the key paragraphs from that Prologue:

The office — Kenzie/Gennaro Investigations — is closed, gathering dust, I assume, maybe the first stray cobweb in a corner behind my desk, maybe one behind Angie's too. Angie's been gone since the end of November, and I try not to think about her. Or Grace Cole. Or Grace's daughter, Mae. Or anything at all.

And later:

Sometimes Bubba or Richie or Devin or Oscar drop by... We don't talk about this past autumn or Grace and Mae. We don't talk about Angie. And we never talk about him. He's done his damage, and there's nothing left to say.

The words seem mild, simply gentle declarations of loss, of pain. But they haunt the entire book. We as readers carry Kenzie's loss with us as we read the story that led to that scene on the balcony and we know: nothing can't happen in this book. We know that Kenzie survives (as do the more minor characters Bubba, Richie, Devin and Oscar) but we can't be certain of just about anything else.

And the book throws so much at us that it's hard to catch our breath. We bounce from one horrific scene to the next, from one terrifying character to another. Lehane succeeds in creating a claustrophobic climate dominated by the unknown, unseen villains. They are everywhere yet nowhere.

To their credit, Kenzie and Gennaro are smart enough and human enough to be afraid. Very afraid.

Darkness, Take My Hand is a dense, suspenseful, gripping book that engulfs its reader. It picks us up and tosses us around and overwhelms our senses.

My brother-in-law Gavin tells me Lehane's books get better and better — this, his second novel, is so good I'm not sure that's possible.

Tags: Lehane, Mystery, Darkness, Take My Hand