Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane is a great thriller

Booklist Reviews 2017 March #2

*Starred Review* Lehane is one of our most versatile crime writers: he's done series mysteries (the Kenzie-Gennaro novels), stand-alone thrillers (Mystic River, 2001), horror-thriller blends (Shutter Island, 2003), and large-scale historical novels (The Given Day, 2008), and he's done them all superbly. Now he adds psychological thrillers to his résumé. Rachel Childs, the protagonist in this slalom course of a tale, is a mess. She was once a rising television journalist, but an on-camera meltdown sent her career into free fall and left her a virtual shut-in, obsessed with finding her father, who vanished from her life as a child. Everything changes when she falls in love with her own Mr. McDreamy, Brian Delacroix, and he slowly pulls her out of her shell. Then the slalom course takes its most jarring turn: Is Brian hiding something? Well, yes, he's hiding plenty.A lot of thrillers boast twisty plots, but Lehane plies his corkscrew on more than the story line. The mood and pace of the novel change directions, too, jumping from thoughtful character study to full-on suspense thriller, like a car careening down San Francisco's Lombard Street, cautiously at one moment, hell-bent at another. But this narrative vehicle never veers out of control, and when Lehane hits the afterburners in the last 50 pages, he produces one of crime fiction's most exciting and well-orchestrated finalesâ€"rife with dramatic tension and buttressed by rich psychological interplay between the characters. Don't be surprised if Since We Fell makes readers forget about that other psychological thriller featuring an unstable heroine named Rachel.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The buzz has already begun for this one and will soon reach ear-shattering levels, aided by the author's 15-city tour and a full component of bells and whistles. Copyright 2017 Booklist Reviews.