Dread looms over search for father
Dennis Lehane specializes in thrillers about damaged characters, and you don’t get much more broken than the heroine of his propulsive latest novel, “Since We Fell.”
The story takes Lehane back to his home territory of present-day Boston, where Rachel is a journalist who doesn’t know who her father was. Her bitter mother concealed his identity, always taunting Rachel that she wasn’t mature enough to know it yet. The mother eventually died in a possibly suicidal car crash as she ran a red light, denying Rachel the knowledge.
The novel begins with two classic, hard-boiled Lehane lines: “On a Tuesday in May, in her thirty-fifth year, Rachel shot her husband dead. He stumbled backward with an odd look of confirmation on his face, as if some part of him
had always known she’d do it.”
Then the story backtracks to observe Rachel grow up, search for her father, fall for inappropriate men and land jobs first in newspapers and then in television. On assignment in Haiti to cover an earthquake in 2010, she suffers a nervous breakdown, loses her job and begins to find it impossible to leave her apartment.
A renewed relationship draws her out, but that leads to problems of its own.
Lehane is a master of pacing, setting up questions and then withholding their answers just long enough. At first, the questions of Rachel’s paternity ■ “Since We Fell” (Ecco, $27.99, 432 pages) by Dennis Lehane and her motives for killing her husband run in tandem, taking turns dominating the narrative.
Later, more-pressing questions arise, stepping up the tempo.
What separates Lehane from the usual run of thriller writers is the way he allows thought and emotion to rough up the slick surface of his prose, pausing to snag the reader’s attention with a description of a sky — “the dark of Germanic fairy tales and solar eclipses” — or, for example, “the sudden, uncertain smile of a man who had, at some point in his life, been conditioned to ask for permission before he expressed joy.”
Lehane plays right on the edge of the “woman in jeopardy” trope, occasionally back-loading Rachel with so many problems that it’s surprising she isn’t totally emotionally paralyzed. And while he has a reputation for finely tuned dialogue, he sometimes skirts the overly cute, particularly with the banter Rachel and her love interest exchange in times of mortal peril.
What can’t be contested is the sense of dread that pervades the book, escalating as Rachel attempts to take control of a situation she’s only beginning to understand.