The Drop - Dennis Lehane

Here's something on which I usually don't bite: repackaging of a short fiction first published in a collection, particularly when the reason for the repackaging is to coincide with the release of a motion picture based on that short fiction. 

But The Drop was by DENNIS LEHANE, one of a handful of authors in whom I have never, ever been disappointed. Ever. It also didn't hurt that I've been on another run of novels that just refused to engage my heart or my imagination, and which, therefore, I did not finish. 

Bob is, by all appearances, a feckless bartender with little going for him. When he finds a puppy abandoned in a trash can, and then meets a young woman with plenty of bad decisions in her resume, Bob begins to find himself in unfamiliar emotional territory. A cast of treacherous friends, the Chechen mafia, and the godless man who dumped that puppy in the garbage provide plenty of windmills against which this modern day Don Quixote must tilt. 

Dennis Lehane clearly has a heart wide open for folks who live around all the dark corners, the ones you'd feel safer crossing the street than encountering on a public sidewalk at dusk. He knows what we all know, of course: there's a story and a tragedy and a triumph somewhere in every one of them. That he consistently invites us into something like communion with them through his novels is a wonderment. 

Highly, highly recommended.  

Publication date: September 2, 2014

William Morrow

An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

And here's a little treat... the trailer for the movie