I've given up trying to write a review for Sacred, Dennis Lehane's third novel featuring the detective duo of Kenzie and Gennaro. Why? Because I am so disappointed with it I find it hard to think clearly.

With apologies to Gavin, this book is a real let down. The plot is so convoluted that, once you figure out what is actually going on, the stuff that happened at the start no longer makes any sense. The theme appears to be that, in this bad old world, you can trust no one. Only K&G can trust each other and they are falling rapidly and everlastingly in love, surrendering to the inevitable. So Kenzie spends much of his time mooning over Gennaro rather than dealing with the case they've taken on. Blah blah blah.

What really bothers me is that Lehane resorts to some pretty shaky strategies in this book. He knows readers want action right from page one but he also knows that, in first-person detective novels that involve searching for a missing person (as this book does), it's really difficult to find a way to start the action before you spend 20 pages or so setting up the case. So he has the client attack and kidnap K&G before hiring them. And we, as readers, are supposed to buy 1) that K&G would be so stupid as to fall into the trap and 2) that after being attacked, drugged and dragged against their will to a remote mansion on the coast, they would actually agree to work for the rich dude and NOT suspect that he might be lying to them.

Lehane also uses Bubba as a way to incorporate ultra-violent scenes without bloodying the hands of his protagonists, with whom we the readers are supposed to identify. Bubba actually tortures people on behalf of K&G and we are supposed to see K&G as a sweet, innocent couple, falling in love while ridding the world of evil. It's ridiculous. K&G are every bit as culpable for the horrific acts Bubba and his buddies perpetrate as they are. K&G are no better than the villains they pursue. Lehane goes to great lengths to show Kenzie lamenting over the fact that, in book one, he actually pulled the trigger in the cold-blooded murder of a defenseless gang-banger, yet then has Kenzie sitting watching Bubba torture K&G's enemies in order to gain information from them.

Lehane's a great writer, don't get me wrong, but he's heading in directions that I find hard to accept. Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe was a solitary knight who took on evil according to his particular code of honour. K&G are just as evil as the people they fight.

And I can't help but draw a parallel between Lehane's new type of anti-hero and the current culture in the US. Just as Bush and his colleagues attempt to justify torture and killing and corruption on the basis that the enemy is even more evil than we are, so too do K&G. What happened to living by your principles no matter what? What happened to honour? How can you justify taking another person to task for their evil deeds when you yourself commit the same evil deeds in pursuing them?

I am frankly scared by what I'm seeing, frightened by how far we have gone as a society towards accepting the argument that the ends justify the means, that as long as what we are seeking fits in with our own biased sense of what's right and what's wrong, we are entitled to take whatever steps we wish, no matter how ugly or morally reprehensible, to accomplish those ends.

Lehane's characters certainly seem to have accepted that. I don't think I can.

Tags: Lehane, Kenzie