What sets Lehane apart from most other writers in the field is his insistence at peering long and hard into the shadows. Most writers of mysteries and thrillers show us the surface results of criminal actions: dead bodies, looted houses, burned down businesses. Lehane asks us to examine not just the action, but the evil that lies beneath it. And he gives us a good, lingering look.
Prayers for Rain is the fifth book in Lehane's series following private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, a romantically inclined Boston duo with mob connections. At the end of Lehane's previous novel, Gone Baby Gone, the pair split over a decision about how to handle a case they were working, a decision that haunts Patrick throughout Rain.
Rain opens with Patrick taking a case from Karen Nichols, a young, sweet, innocent woman who seems too good to be true. Patrick immediately takes to her.
"...I found myself wondering where they grew people like her, and if there was a seed, and how I could get my hands on it if I ever had a daughter."
Karen's problem seems simple enough. A man is sexually harassing her at her gym. She politely asked him to stop. He refused. She asked again. He vandalized her car. She is afraid he is going to rape her, and she has come to Patrick through a referral. Patrick accepts the case and tells her she will never hear from this man again.
Patrick takes along his lifelong friend, Bubba Rogowski, who is a wide hunk of mob muscle who plays by his own rules. What ensues is what most many people believe sexual harassers deserve: a severe beating, in this case with a tennis racket, as well as a promise to come back and put a bullet in the man's skull if he ever talks to Karen Nichols again.
Effective enough. Case closed.
But not so fast.
Six months later Karen Nichols is dead. Not murdered. She leaped to her death from a twenty-story building, naked, putting an end to her own life.
This, Patrick cannot accept. He cannot reconcile the woman he met, albeit briefly, with his impression of her as an innocent, happy and well-adjusted woman with the depressed wreck she apparently became. There is, of course, more to the story.
"Karen Nichols's life had been on a slide steeper than a fall from the Eiger."
Indeed. In six months, Karen's boyfriend, a man she loved truly, madly, deeply, had fallen in a crowded street and been hit by a Cadillac, landing him in an infirmary for a prolonged comatose stay. Medical bills had eaten up Karen's savings, and a spiraling depression seized Karen's life, leading to the loss of her job, car and apartment. Her parents, rich and powerful, refused to help. She turned to drugs. Prostitution. And finally: death.
That Patrick determines to investigate at all tells us much about his character, as well as a good deal about Lehane as a writer. Patrick Kenzie is a latecomer in a fabled line of white knights. He reminds one of John D MacDonald's Travis McGee, someone who takes up lost causes not for any actual gain but simply to redress the wrongs of this world.
Even Patrick can't explain why he is the way he is. When Karen's parents ask him why he is asking questions about a death that has been conclusively ruled a suicide, he has no definite answer.
"I felt powerless. To try to sum up my desire to right wrongs whose victim was well beyond benefiting from my efforts seemed impossible. How do you explain the pulls that dictate and often define your life in a few concise sentences?"
But it is this murky moral landscape that Lehane deftly explores from novel to novel, and the truth is that he needs a hero like Patrick in order to set out on such hefty undertakings. It is not so much the nature of crime that Lehane is intent on examining, but the nature of sin. A detective less concerned with such things simply will not serve Lehane's purpose.
At one point, Patrick sits through a brisk Catholic service. He is intoned by the reverend to leave behind the darkness and follow the light of God.
"...'Get out and do what's right.' He thumped the lectern for emphasis. 'Do what's light. Do you see?'
I looked around the pews. Several people nodded. No one looked like he had the first clue as to what Father McKendrick was talking about."
This is a central element to Lehane's worldview. Somehow the average everyday person has lost sight of how to do the right thing. This is the world Patrick lives in, a world of confusion about morality and ethics, a world in which sin, corruption and evil thrive. And though he certainly doesn't believe he can hand out justice to all, Patrick clearly believes in trying to do the right thing, in trying to bring balance, to leave behind the darkness and hold onto the light.
Sadly, as Raymond Chandler once noted, this is not a business for knights.
Patrick's investigation leads him to a stunning conclusion: someone set out to destroy Karen Nichols's life piece by piece, forcing her into a downward spiral until she finally brought her life to an end. White knight that he is, Patrick cannot let this go unanswered, but the man he is hunting turns his sights on Patick, and all that Patrick holds dear.
The back and forth mano a mano that ensues allows Lehane to set up some seriously heavy questions. Is love real? Does loyalty exist? Or are we all merely animals shucking through this hairy world?
In the hands of other writers, such questions often take a backseat, and the lines are generally painted with much more clarity. There is little question about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in the works of, say, John Sandford (this does not, however, imply that Sandford is somehow less of a writer). For Lehane, though, no one comes out clean.
Lehane gives these lines to one man who cheated on his wife to fuck Karen Nichols after she came onto him for months:
"It's the darkness, you know? The chance to disappear into, I mean, really bad places while you're doing something that feels really damn good. Sometimes, you don't want to be on top of a woman who looks at you with all this love in her eyes. You want to be on top of a woman who looks into your face and knows you. Knows the bad you, the nasty you...And likes that you. Wants that you...
"We stayed out there by the picnic table for a while, neither of us speaking. Cicadas hummed through the scawny treetops and raccoons clawed through the brambles on the far side of the clearing. The barn seemed to sag another inch, and Karen Nichols's voice whispered through the rural blight:
See? No one loves.No one loves."
Against this darkness Lehane pits Patrick, who believes he loved Angie Gennaro and still does, who believes in his loyalty to the violent and brutal Bubba Rogowski, who believes that sometimes we've paid for our crimes and deserve redemption.
Explaining to Karen's father why, late in the novel, he should let Patrick handle the man who destroyed Karen's life:
"You've paid, Doctor. You did a terrible thing, but then she fell through the ice, and first your son and now Pearse have tortured you for ten years. I don't know if that's enough justice for God, but it's enough for me. You've done your time. You've had your hell."
Rain's ending is both satisfying and disturbing, for Lehane is not the kind of writer to offer clear-cut answers. While the ending is less devastating than the end of Gone Baby Gone, Lehane pulls out a few final twists that leave the reader feeling unsettled. Like other writers who peer into the darkness--Ed McBain, or Stephen King, for example--evil in Lehane's world lingers. The good guys win battles, but the outcome of the war is less certain.
As one character pointed out:
"...'Wishing to be saved? In this world, yeah? It's...'
'It's what?' I said.
She looked at me like I was a child who'd asked why fire burns or seasons change.
'Well, it's like praying for rain, isn't it, Mr. Kenzie? Praying for rain in the middle of a desert.'"
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