Before reading this latest novel by Dennis Lehane, I was blown away by the first 5 ( A Drink Before the War, Darkness, Take My Hand, Sacred, Gone Baby Gone, Prayers for Rain ), detective novels of startling audacity and inventiveness, featuring a pair of private detectives, Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, and magnified a city even in its darkness, Boston, a bit like Harry Bosch and his Los Angeles , then I was rather disappointed by the 2 following Mystic River and Shutter Island , novels blacks agreed or without Kenzie Gennaro. Needless to say I was rather hesitant towards a book that once again my favorite couple of private detectives was absent, and what is worse is presented as a historical novel, the kind I do not like.
What I liked in the investigation of Kenzie and Gennaro, besides the poetic titles, was of course the plots complex and turbulent, the twists, suspense and unexpected outcomes are essential to great novels, the 'infectious love of an author for his city, but especially dazzling style, 2-3 sentences (per book) out of the blue hand and never read before and which left me speechless with admiration (and jealousy) and the dialogues tasty, these verbal jousts, mixtures of love, humor, desire and aggression, between Kenzie and Gennaro, worthy of Shakespeare's comedies.
These dazzling and sparkling dialogues had disappeared two novels that disappointed me, I did not found a country in at dawn but I found other qualities almost equal.
We can talk about great historical fresco showing the birth of a nation while paradoxically the story - stories - taking place almost entirely in Boston and a short period of two years ago.
But during these two years there things happen: the end of the first world war, the catastrophic epidemic of English influenza, the advance of ideas of trade unionism and left into the police, the radicalization of workers, and cause or consequence of the radicalization in power, the beginnings of what would become the FBI's hunt for the Bolsheviks and anarchists, bomb who respond or above, the first police strike in Boston in USA, and the terrible riots that followed the suppression and equally terrible, and near or above all this, the problem Immigration and the racial issue, all within a block of 760 pages with numerous individual fates intertwine brilliantly, connecting the stories to history.
Frescoes of this kind are not rare, far away, but it is successful at all points of view, one comes across a real historical figures (Babe Ruth, the greatest baseball player of all time, the future President Coolidge, Hoover, the future master of the FBI, and anarchists famous in their time) without melee characters invented fireworks, black, white, Irish, Slavic, Italian, cops, gangsters, politicians, workers, pretty faces of courageous women whose courage is not only physical but also moral, of these women who are not afraid to love completely (Nora Lila the black and Irish) hate or until death (Tessa, the setter of bomb fanatic), but two male characters especially memorable, the cop Danny White and Luther, the multi-talented young black, thick and deep that almost equals real life, and changing, insights into dramatic errors, the immaturity of young dogs to a crazy wonderful nobility of soul, becoming two models of what this land of extremes can produce best.
A stunning portrait and unvarnished essence of America in its most hateful (unscrupulous politicians, unscrupulous bosses, corrupt cops, racism, violence, stupidity, ignorance, greed) and most admirable (saints, martyrs and heroes, generosity, greatness of soul, consciousness Acute duty, love of neighbor and an unwavering commitment to build a better world to force the wrist)
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