When I started Gone, Baby, Gone, my husband assured me that I would like it more than Sacred, the previous K&G novel. While Sacred still stands as my favorite, Gone, Baby, Gone was still another fast-paced and engrossing novel from Lehane.

My impressions about it are probably, to some extent, hung up in the fact that I saw the movie before I knew there was a book series. But, even so, I found myself caught up in the unresolvable, thickly tangled tragedy of the story.

The downsides were, for me, that those elements that raised Sacred above the other volumes of the series were again missing in GBG. Gone, Baby, Gone is less sharply, wittily funny than Sacred; we're back to Angie being more of a passive participant/sidekick, and we are back to Patrick's existential angst about the ugliness of the world. And, on the one hand, this makes sense: it's hard to be funny and it's hard not to feel a certain amount of angst and sadness about the ugliness of the world when you're confronting child abduction and child abuse. It's not a funny subject. And GBG is still quite powerful, especially as it confronts the lack of a clear "win" to be extracted from the situation, the shortfall between legally "right" and morally "right" and the messy coils of when or if ends justify the means.