Roller-coaster excitement in ‘Moonlight Mile’

In fact I rated Mystic River a highly intelligent literary thriller I believed to be one of the best, if not the best book I'd read in 2003.

For the author's sake, I wish I could say the same of his 2010 book Moonlight Mile but I can't. That the chief character faces a dilemma is a given with Lehane's writings. In Moonlight Mile Patrick Kendall is a freelance private investigator with a conscience engaged by an up-market security firm.

Twelve years before we meet him Patrick had been hired to find Amanda McCready, a four-year-old girl who had been kidnapped from her feckless, neglectful mother, Helene by her uncle Lionel; he had given the child to a loving couple desperate to have a child. Lionel went to prison for 12 years, his wife Beatrice tried to protect Amanda but Helene, while still neglecting her daughter, and drifting from one relationship with a sex offender to another, took out protective orders against her sister-in-law.

Patrick tracks down a spoiled rich kid whose habitual teenaged drinking and driving (and tickets) should have ended when his latest accident put a girl in a wheelchair for life. Patrick chucked up his chance of a permanent position with the security firm when he was told he shouldn't have bawled out the client for drinking and driving – and he realised his work had given the security firm all the information needed to cover the tracks of the rich kid – and leave the crippled girl with no compensation for her injuries.

So far, so good, but this is only the beginning, an introduction to the main story of Patrick and his wife Angie's search for Amanda who, at 16, has gone missing again. Despite her unpromising background, Amanda is a very bright kid with offers of a place from at least two Ivy League Universities.

Patrick gets mugged, his laptop stolen, he chases the thief, gets worked over by said thief's associates and warned to stay away from Helene McCready. From here on in it's a roller coaster ride of violence, obscenities, the Russian mafia and corpses galore.

Patrick and Angie find Amanda who – but to tell that would spoil the surprise ending which didn't make sense to me, but may to you.

Suffice it to say that Amanda disappeared because she wanted to disappear, to assume a new identity and leave her old life behind, taking with her the four-week-old infant, her best friend's baby she'd kidnapped from a crazy Russian mafia boss and his deranged Mexican wife.

Did Patrick and Angie try to stop her? Not on your nelly. They're giving up the PI Business – but what they're going to live on is anybody's guess in the current job market in the US.

Oh well, if roller-coaster excitement, violence and some choice obscenities are your bag when it comes to fiction, you'll find Moonlight Mile at Nigel Khan bookstores, Nationwide … where there is also a wide selection of spiritual reading for this Lenten season.