Gone Baby, Gone

Things that are dangerous for Maggie to decide:
"Oh, since I have this $100 bill that I need to break, I'll just let myself buy a book when I get to the airport at that Boarders in the terminal, and they'll give me change and I'll have something to read..."

Three books later, I dove into Gone Baby, Gone while sitting and waiting for the plane to Minneapolis to take off. Since I got there super early, and since the plane was delayed, and since I read rather quickly, and since this book is addictive to the point that I am not sure I so much as looked up more than once an hour or so while reading it, I was done with the whole thing with enough time to take a nap before the wheels touched down in Minnesota. Allow me to say that there is not better way to spend a snowy day trapped in an airport/on a plane than with a good thriller like this one.

And a good thriller it is. I have not seen the movie, although I will now be adding it to my netflix, but I can see how an amazing movie could come out of this book. (I should point out, that the bar's pretty high, since Lehane is also responsible for the book that is the basis for one of my favorite movies, Mystic River.)

Anyway, the plot is fast paced without being overwhelming or making the action hard to follow. The characters are reasonably complex and realistically, likably, flawed. There are true villians, and sort of villians, and people who do bad things for good reasons, and I truly didn't have it figured out before the end.

I'm not saying that I would classify this as a great acheivement in literature. It's not. I don't think that it aspires to be. What it does, though, it does well. And there is something to be said for airport the day before the interview ficton. This one makes you think just enough to keep you very busy, but not enough to make you very tired.

Want to see what else I've been reading, or track just how much a bookworm I am:
The 2008 Booklist and Tally