This one is the sixth book in this series, and if you haven’t read at least ‘gone baby gone’ you’re likely to get confused. In that book little Amanda went missing at four years old. I was just as surprised as Kenzie to find out she’s sixteen now.
Yup, this book is a jump ahead in time from the last one. Kenzie has a family and everything. Guys, he has a daughter who is amazingly cute, and has his love of word play which leads to some odd but amusing conversations. I thought he was starting to feel a little creaky around the edges in the last book, but in this one he’s definitely not feeling like a spring chicken anymore.
Here’s the blurb:
Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston neighborhood twelve years ago. Desperate pleas for help from the child’s aunt led investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl—only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home.
Now Amanda is sixteen—and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing. Yet Amanda’s aunt is once more knocking on Patrick Kenzie’s door, fearing the worst for the little girl who has blossomed into a striking, clever young woman—a woman who hasn’t been seen in weeks.
Haunted by their consciences, Kenzie and Gennaro revisit the case that troubled them the most. Their search leads them into a world of identity thieves, methamphetamine dealers, a mentally unstable crime boss and his equally demented wife, a priceless, thousand-year-old cross, and a happily homicidal Russian gangster. It’s a world in which motives and allegiances constantly shift and mistakes are fatal.
In their desperate fight to confront the past and find Amanda McCready, Kenzie and Gennaro will be forced to question if it’s possible to do the wrong thing and still be right or to do the right thing and still be wrong. As they face an evil that goes beyond broken families and broken dreams, they discover that the sins of yesterday don’t always stay buried and the crimes of today could end their lives.
Gone baby gone was always my favorite book of the series, mostly because of the moral problem Kenzie and Gennaro found themselves in once they finally found Amanda. There is no right answer. I mean, you can’t just take it on yourself to snatch kids from neglectful parents. If an individual off the street is allowed to judge parents and find them lacking, then where would that lead? On the other hand, Amanda could have had a much better childhood if she were allowed to stay with the parents who loved and took care of her instead of going back to her mother.
This book takes another look at those moral problems we faced in that book, and see the impact of the choice Kenzie had to make. And of course there’s a whole boat load of action, made even more scary by Kenzie being a little rusty and stupid thugs threatening his daughter what seems like every couple minutes. I didn’t realize what a unique position he had before only having friends who can kick ass until there’s a little girl these guys can try and use for leverage.
On a happier note Bubba has a decent amount of face time, and is much loved uncle Bubba now. He’s shooting guys in one scene, then babysitting in another. It’s both cute, and scary.
The plot is as usual for this series full of twisty twistiness. I think the only thing that stopped this being five stars for me was my sadness about Kenzie losing his grove. Still, he does pretty good, and I guess he does have to slow down eventually.
For more reviews on this book check out: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7853757-moonlight-mile
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