As richly complex and brutal as the landscape it depicts, this is actually the mesmerizing, darkly primary novel that heralded the arrival of Dennis Lehane, the master of the new noir-and introduced Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, his clever and tough personal investigators weaned on the blue-collar roads of Dorchester.

A cabal of powerful Boston politicians is ready to pay Kenzie and Gennaro big money for any seemingly small work: to find a missing cleaning female who stole some key docs. As Kenzie and Gennaro learn, however, this crime is no common robbery. It’s about justice, about correct and wrong. But in Boston, finding the truth isn’t just a filthy business . it’s deadly.