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Summary
Summary
Since We Fell follows Rachel Childs, a former journalist who, after an on-air mental breakdown, now lives as a virtual shut-in. In all other respects, however, she enjoys an ideal life with an ideal husband. Until a chance encounter on a rainy afternoon causes that ideal life to fray. As does Rachel's marriage. As does Rachel herself. Sucked into a conspiracy thick with deception, violence, and possibly madness, Rachel must find the strength within herself to conquer unimaginable fears and mind-altering truths. By turns heart- breaking, suspenseful, romantic, and sophisticated, Since We Fell is a novel of profound psychological insight and tension. It is Dennis Lehane at his very best.
Author Notes
Dennis Lehane was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts on August 4, 1965. He graduated from Eckerd College and the graduate program in creative writing at Florida International University.
He has written several mystery novels including Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; and Shutter Island. A Drink Before the War won the 1995 Shamus Award for Best First Novel by the Private Eye Writers of America. Mystic River won the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction, and France's Prix Mystère de la Critique. Three of his novels, Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone; and Shutter Island were made into feature films. He also wrote, produced, and directed the film, Neighborhoods.
His lbook, Moonlight Mile, concerns the mystery of finding a missing 16-year-old girl in Boston. Lehane's book, World Gone By, made several 2015 Bestseller lists including The New York Times, Publisher's Weekly, and USA Today.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Reader Whelan captures the complexity of the protagonist and suspense of Lehane's psychological thriller set in contemporary Boston. The story revolves around Rachel Childs, the once rising star TV news reporter whose career ended in 2009, when she melted down on-air while covering the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. In the years since, Rachel has remained jobless and emotionally shattered, and become prone to panic attacks. She attributes her crippling anxiety to her absent father, who abandoned her when she was five. Rachel, now in her late 30s, rarely leaves the house except to investigate the identity of her father, which she sees as the antidote to her mental issues. That's how she meets Brian Delacroix, a handsome and charismatic private eye, who becomes her new source of stability and eventually her husband. Yet one bump in the road of married life, and Rachel loses control leading her to conspiracy theories about her husband. Whelan pulls the listener along this ever-twisting plot with a cool, low-key delivery that allows Lehane's clean, proficient prose to flow easily without any embellishments. She keeps characterizations of supporting characters, such as Brian and Rachel's mom, to a minimum, but the dialogue is delivered naturally and easy to follow. Whelan excels at subtly voicing Rachel's interior state as she grows from insecure, agoraphobic recluse to a take-charge woman of action. An Ecco hardcover. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The Thirst by Jo Nesbo; Dead Woman Walking by Sharon Bolton; A Dark So Deadly by Stuart MacBride; Don't Let Go by Michel Bussi; The Special Girls by Isabelle Grey; Heretics by Leonardo Padura; Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane Very few writers in the thriller genre achieve superstar status; the Norwegian Jo Nesbo is not only the reigning king of Scandinavian crime fiction, but is also called on as a TV pundit when reality reflects his books (as at the time of the Breivik massacres, as Nesbo had written so persuasively about the rise of the far right in his country). While enjoying prodigious sales, his last few books have not gleaned the critical acclaim of earlier work such as The Redbreast, but the weighty The Thirst (Harvill Secker, [pound]20, translated by Neil Smith) may rebalance that popular and critical success. It's a big-boned, Technicolor epic in the current Nesbo style, starting adagio and ending accelerando, but with the kind of close psychological character readings that distinguished his early work. The detective Harry Hole is reluctantly co-opted to track down a vicious murderer who has killed a woman after an internet date. And when a second victim is found, Harry realises that there is a connection with the one case that defeated him. Both justice and closure may be within his grasp -- as well as a return to his lost childhood. Dead Woman Walking (Bantam, [pound]12.99) once again signals what has made the novels of SJ (now Sharon) Bolton so successful: her clever amalgamation of two genres -- the crepuscular, uncanny mystery (not supernatural, but suggesting the trappings of that genre) and the more traditional crime/thriller narrative. After a tense opening involving a plummeting hot air balloon over Northumberland, survivor Jessica Lane recognises murderer Patrick Faa, scion of a Romany family -- which puts her right in the line of fire. Stuart MacBride is a signature writer of the Tartan Noir school, but his uncompromising work is not for the squeamish. A Dark So Deadly (HarperCollins, [pound]16.99) has DC Callum MacGregor making an egregious mistake when he covers up an error by his pregnant lover, a crime scene specialist. Demoted to a squad of disgraced coppers, he finds himself dealing with a mummified corpse discovered on a local rubbish heap. The initial response is that it is a prank, the body stolen from a museum, but MacGregor and his colleagues demur -- and find they have a chance to redeem their reputations. Even longer than Nesbo, this pungent standalone finds room for an entertaining protagonist who serves as Greek chorus, commenting on the tropes of the crime field even as MacBride toys with them. Some writers try carefully calibrated alterations on a winning formula from book to book, but offer few surprises. That can't be said of the French author Michel Bussi, whose first books to appear in English ranged from an off-kilter saga of a plane crash to a mystery set in Monet's garden at Giverny. That refusal to repeat himself is evident in Don't Let Go (Weidenfeld, [pound]12.99, translated by Sam Taylor), which is just as accomplished as its predecessors. Liane Bellion and her husband, Martial, along with their infant daughter, are enjoying the life of lotus eaters on the island of Reunion when Liane unaccountably vanishes. The police find the couple's room splattered with blood, and Martial is in the frame. But then he and his daughter go on the run, and a manhunt ensues in which fear and racial tension infect the idyllic island. The Special Girls by Isabelle Grey (Quercus, [pound]19.99) offers a penetrating analysis of Stockholm syndrome in a book with a notably filmic sensibility (Grey has considerable experience in TV drama). A psychiatric registrar is bludgeoned to death near a summer camp for patients suffering from eating disorders. DI Grace Fisher is to find that the respected Professor Sir Ned Chesham, who runs the camp, is perhaps not all that he appears to be. The Cuban Leonardo Padura's reputation is ironclad, and if you need reminding why, pick up Heretics (Bitter Lemon, [pound]12.99, translated by Anna Kushner) -- although those seeking a linear crime scenario may be nonplussed by the book's jostling between the modern day and 17th-century Amsterdam. Bibulous sleuth Mario Conde is now a secondhand book dealer, but becomes entangled in a mystery involving a Rembrandt portrait and his grandparents, who fled from Nazi Germany but were not allowed into Cuba. It's as much an astringent picture of Padura's own society as a crime fiction outing. US writer Dennis Lehane 's invigorating Since We Fell (Little, Brown, [pound]18.99) bears traces of his magnum opus, Mystic River. After a breakdown, ex-journalist Rachel Charles lives a reclusive life. She has, however, a supportive husband -- until a chance encounter snatches away everything she holds dear. With sharply acute characterisation, this is classic Lehane. And since some of it is set in London, there's an added piquancy for the British reader. - Barry Forshaw.
New York Review of Books Review
OF THE TRUE MYSTERIES of the universe - What is the nature of time? What are the origins of life and is there life on other worlds? - the one we may never solve is the mystery of other people. This is the underlying subject of all fiction - Who are you, and why are you different from me? - and especially of the mystery genre. Dennis Lehane, as much as any writer, has built a career as a philosopher of the human animal. In books like "Mystic River" and "Shutter Island," he pushed the boundaries between genre and character. Deep down, it would appear, he knows that as much as readers want to know the truth about what happened and how (let's call this plot), what we're most intrigued by is the why. Why do some people commit terrible crimes and not others? Why are some people driven by greed, by jealousy and fear, and how do we recognize these people so we can protect ourselves from them? Because at the end of the day, the guilty among us look just like the innocent. We share the same genes, the same basic environment. We were raised with the same values (for the most part), and yet deep down each of us is a stranger to the other. "Since We Fell," Lehane's latest novel, feels even more than his previous books like a balancing act between a character study and a thriller, one in which the genre nature of the book hides its head for so long that the reader ultimately surrenders the idea that he or she is reading anything other than a literary novel about an attractive and successful young woman slowly surrendering to paranoia and madness. The first thing we learn about Rachel Childs is that she grew up without a father, raised by the kind of mother who drives a surprising amount of literature: largerthan- life, domineering, charismatic. Matriarch as sun and moon, career-driven and non-nurturing. From the time of Rachel's birth, mother and daughter were bound together in a kind of folie à deux. As a result, Rachel grew to define herself in reference to her mother - the ways they were similar, the ways Rachel hoped they were different. And yet at her core how could she avoid adopting her mother's skewed worldview, her uneasy relationship to power, her distrust of other people and - worse - her mother's less-than-flattering opinion of this new and unformed person called Rachel? The daughter was a girl the mother competed with, one she belittled at every turn in order to maintain dominance. It takes a lot for a child to grow up in the shadow of such a narcissistic parent without surrendering to self-loathing and doubt, but it seems at first that Rachel has managed to find some peace and a place for herself. After college she becomes a TV journalist, a talking head with a bright future and a handsome fiancé, himself rising through the ranks at the network. But under it all is a gnawing question: Who is my father, and why did he leave? This is Rachel's mystery, concerned not with the nature of time and space, but with the strange decisions made by the fickle meat inside other people's heads. So in her 20s Rachel begins the quest that will come to define the next decade of her life, the search for a man whose name her mother never told her. The search has twists and turns. At one point she finds the man all evidence suggests is her long-lost daddy, only to learn they share no biological connection. All the while, Rachel somehow manages to live up to the expectations of the normal world - thriving even, at work and in life - but then an assignment to Haiti in the aftermath of a natural disaster leads to a downward spiral. Damaged people, you see, can be propped up and held together by the boundaries of a functional world, but when you drop them into chaos, the chaos inside them rattles free. Rachel self-destructs. Her fiancé leaves her. She loses her job, then her career. Alcohol becomes her solace and she retreats into unchecked anxiety, her insecurities calcifying into agoraphobia. She becomes the waste of space her mother always told her she was. And then - still early in this eventful book - she meets Brian. Or I should say re-meets Brian, because a decade earlier he floated through her life for 10 minutes as a private investigator she hired in her endless search for her father. These days, we learn, Brian has leftthat life behind, returning to the family business his rich father started. He is handsome and successful, and he confesses a secret to Rachel. She is the one who got away. Slowly, with love and patience, Brian brings her out of her shell. He helps reintroduce her to the world. They get married. Her anxiety dulls, fades. Rachel, at long last, has found the peace and love she deserves. And for a time they are happy. But then suspicion - all those old hard-wired patterns of distrust - creep back in. There is a business trip abroad that Rachel comes to believe Brian never took. A sighting of him getting into a waiting car when he was supposed to be traveling overseas. Is he lying to her? Is Brian just another in a long list of manipulators and deceivers - another crazy mother, another abandoning father? This is the mystery. Should we believe the worst about people or the best? Can old patterns change? Can people surprise us for the better? The turn, when it comes, is both satisfying and somehow disappointing. Until now, the high-wire act Lehane has managed - to crafta character thriller, a psychological nail-biter based on real emotion and relatable anxiety - has been the rarest kind of page-turner, one in which character, not plot, drives the book's addictiveness. The thriller that emerges in the last 100- plus pages is more than satisfying on its own merits. Lehane takes all of Rachel's weaknesses, the tools she has used to overcome her deep psychological flaws, and turns them into strengths in navigating a world gone mad. She becomes truly fierce. Freed of the shackles of being normal, she takes her revenge on the world that has abused and manipulated her for her whole life. But at the same time, there is something reductive about the last third of the book. A story that flirted with the unsolvable mysteries of a human being called Rachel becomes a simple tale of what happens next. This is not a knock, necessarily, for readers of Lehane's past work and lovers of the genre. They may feel it takes too long to get to the action, but I loved watching the author walk the tightrope of deeper questions, was thrilled to see him push the boundaries of human understanding for its own merits, without needing an adrenaline fix of life-or-death stakes and villains with guns. Freed of the shackles of being normal, Lehane's heroine takes her revenge on the world. NOAH HAWLEY is the show runner for "Fargo" on FX and the author, most recently, of the thriller "Before the Fall."
