Book Review

Title: A Drink Before the War
Author: Dennis Lehane

I thought it might be fun to put up book reviews as I read. I have a strange relationship with books. Growing up, I didn't read that much. I preferred watching cartoons and playing computer games. I read an odd book every couple of months but most of my reading was confined to assigned books for school. Now it seems a bit odd, because I enjoy science fiction and fantasy fiction so reading in those genres would have been a great outlet. Surprisingly, this changed post college, and I have been reading a lot for pleasure the last 6 years.

What drew me to A Drink Before the War? XX and I are fans of the movie "Gone, Baby, Gone" which is based on Dennis Lehane's novel. I absolutely love that movie and thought it had a great blend of suspense and twists. My one complaint is that I didn't find necessarily find Casey Affleck to be quite believable as the lead character. He's a bit scrawny and I didn't necessarily think that his wise-cracking was suitable to the character. At the time, I assumed that the Patrick Kenzie character would be a more hard-nosed tough guy and that his portrayal strayed from the book. Rather than pick up the book of the same title I started started with the first book of the series.

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are private detectives who are hired by a state politician to track down a person and certain "documents" that she has. This leads to the detectives discovering some pretty dark secrets involving the nature of these documents and the persons involved. The book has a few twists, but none that are particularly mind-blowing. I'm not the type who tries to guess things ahead in the novel but I think observant readers would not find the twists surprising either. The subject nature is definitely dark, I don't want to give away too much of the content of the book but I was surprised by how evil some of the characters are.

The book does make me re-evaluate Casey Affleck's performance. He absolutely nailed it. The novel is written fron Kenzie's perspective, and he has the same wise-cracking wit and sarcasm that he portrayed in the movie. In retrospect, his performance, which I always thought was good, was actually great.

The most appealling parts of the book for me are the details of Boston. I grew up in the suburbs and am very familiar with the city, but not the poorer neighborhoods where a lot of the story takes place. I love how scenes take place in South Station or at Downtown Crossing, mentioning stores and locations that I personally am familiar with. It added a lot of background and visualization to the story.

Overall a very solid book, if not spectacular. I give it a B+.