Since We Fell

I have been a fan of Dennis Lehane for some years, reading several of his books (e.g., World Gone By), but barely scratching the surface of his body of work, many of which have become movies (e.g., Mystic River, Shutter Island, Gone Baby Gone).

There are many positive reviews of this book: Library Journal ("Readers will enjoy going along for the ride in this engrossing story about love, deception, and marital commitment"), Booklist ("...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 finales rife with dramatic tension and buttressed by rich psychological interplay between the characters), and Publishers Weekly ("Set in contemporary Boston, this expertly wrought character study masquerading as a thriller from Edgar-winner Lehane ...features his first-ever female protagonist.)

But the review that came closest to my reaction was the review from the New York Times. They write "The novel begins with a string of joltingly different episodes from an author whose usual style is much more propulsively linear. The sequences are all parts of Rachel’s life, but that doesn’t initially glue them together; she is struggling to figure out who she is, and so are we. Only over time does the larger trajectory of “Since We Fell” become clear.It all makes much more sense in retrospect than it does as the book’s first chapters unfold. Here are some of its early developments: Rachel devotes herself to solving the mystery of her father. It’s complicated, and it leads the book into such unlikely areas as Luminism, the 19th-century style of American landscape painting....The father question is answered, and not in ways likely to improve Rachel’s mental state. Strong and smart as she is, Rachel needs a man in her life. She marries a producer named Sebastian, who works at the Boston TV station where she is a rising star. He’s irritable when Rachel endangers her career, since he cares mostly about her status....One on-air meltdown later, Rachel has been fired and is a public pariah.

Already subject to panic attacks, which are exacerbated by the horrors she saw in Haiti, Rachel stays in her apartment for 18 months. Sebastian drops out of her life. And it leads to Rachel becoming reacquainted with Mr. Right, Brian Delacroix, who she’d known casually and now looks at with new interest...Rachel falls gratefully into his arms, and they are married.Their marriage ushers in a string of wall-to-wall spoiler alerts. Suffice it to say that this second part of “Since We Fell” is sharply different from the first. Suddenly, he begins delivering nonstop suspense only loosely rooted in Rachel’s story and its foundations."

This very long and torturous journey left me largely unmoved, although the last part of the book does speed up and become more engaging. Kirkus, like many other reviewers had only positive things to say. "Don’t zoom through this latest entry in Lehane’s illustrious body of work. You’ll miss plenty of intrigue, intricacies, and emotional subtleties....What seems at the start to be an edgy psychological mystery seamlessly transforms into a crafty, ingenious tale of murder and deception—and a deeply resonant account of one woman’s effort to heal deep wounds that don’t easily show."