Book Reader’s Blog

I finished Coronado today. Just as I suspected these bits of fiction are not like your usual Harlan Coben or Elmore Leonard. And, there is indeed a trend visible—the author confirms that in the interview the publisher included at the end of the material. Mystic River, Shutter Island, Coronado are three bits of work distinctly different from other Lehane’s crime fiction works.

The trend will be continued. There will be a new novel out—I hope—really soon. Lehane has been working on it for more than three and a half years now, and it’s going to be placed in the 1910’s Boston. It will be an ambitious story about love and turmoil. One of the main events to be portrayed in the book is the Boston police protests from 1919, when one day that year all of them decided to leave the service. I can hardly wait…

The stories themselves were quite interesting, but—I have to admit—also a bit on the depressive side. They were showing that on one hand nobody can just skip paying for their sins, on the other that the bad/sinister/ugly side is in most of us. The message behind the stories seems to be outside of our days. If we subtract all the contemporary details, such as cell phones, etc. I would place it in the 1930s or even 1940s.

Have you read Coronado? What did you think about it?

Dennis Lehane. I don’t know exactly what is different about his work, but he is not the usual crime novel writer. Lehane’s books do not focus on plots, culprits, and crime scenes. They give us a deep and well thought through insight into our minds, the good and the bad.

Let’s take a few of the recent ones. Shutter Island is a magnificent study of madness and aggression that’s inside of us. Mystic River is about how we can be different, how very little things affect our lives and lead us to completely opposite positions; it’s also about the loss—loss of our loved ones.

What will Coronado be like? It’s a different medium—short stories (and a play), which makes it more intriguing. It’s a more difficult one, I think, because the author gets less time to immerse the reader in the story’s world. You either have it or lose the reader completely. Let’s see… I’m in the middle of “Running out of dog”