Lehane, Dennis (1965-…), is an American author known for his realistic detective and crime novels. Critics have praised Lehane’s novels for their suspense and their psychological understanding of their complex characters. Lehane’s fiction reflects his Irish working-class background in Boston.
Lehane first gained recognition for his series of detective novels featuring Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. The two are partners who eventually marry. Lehane introduced the couple in A Drink Before the War (1994). He continued the series with Darkness, Take My Hand (1996), Sacred (1997), Gone, Baby, Gone (1998), Prayers for Rain (1999), and Moonlight Mile (2010). In these novels, Lehane examines such social issues as race and class conflict as well as such crimes as rape, murder, and child abuse.
Lehane’s first nonseries novel was Mystic River (2001). This crime story traces the friendship among three male characters from their youth into adulthood in Boston. The novel explores the consequences that follow the abduction and sexual abuse of one of the characters when he was a boy. Shutter Island (2003) is a suspense novel in which a United States marshal investigates the disappearance of a patient from Shutter Island, a fictional federal institution for the criminally insane in Boston Harbor. The Given Day (2008) is a historical novel set in Boston that begins at the end of World War I in 1918. Live by Night (2012) is a crime novel set in Florida, Boston, and Cuba during the 1920’s. World Gone By (2015) is a sequel. Other stand-alone novels are Since We Fell (2017), about a troubled journalist, and Small Mercies (2023), a murder mystery set in Boston in the 1970’s. A number of Lehane’s short stories were collected in Coronado: Stories (2006).
Several of Lehane’s works have been adapted into motion pictures . These films include Mystic River (2003), Gone Baby Gone (2007), Shutter Island (2010), The Drop (2014, based on the short story “Animal Rescue”), and Live by Night (2016).
Lehane was born on Aug. 4, 1965, in the Dorchester area of Boston. He received a B.A.S. degree from Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1988. He earned an M.F.A. degree from Florida International University in Miami in 1993.
