I picked up the first of these novels on my holidays in Massachusetts because I wanted to read something associated with the place I was staying.

That was my first mistake. Robert B Parker’s Spenser novels are the most addictive reading this side of Harry Potter, and the other side as well. Each novel rapidly pulls the reader via a threat of elegant, uncluttered writing, into a tangled plot, generally set somewhere in the dark underbelly of the American dream.

My second mistake was picking up A Savage Place, in which Spenser travels to Los Angeles to provide protection to a TV reporter investigating corruption and racketeering in the movie industry.

So I had to start reading Sudden Mischief immediately after I finished A Savage Place, because it is set in Spenser’s more traditional Boston milieu where he is asked by his lover, Susan, to look into the tangled affairs of her ex-husband.

That was my third mistake: By this stage I had become so uncommunicative with my nose stuck in a Spenser book at every opportunity for days on end that my travelling companions threatened grievous sanctions on me if I didn’t declare a moratorium on reading them until I got home.

Spenser, a man with only one name, is a gumshoe in the classic traditions of Phillip Marlowe, Lew Archer and the rest, a contemporary knight errant (or ronin if that’s your bag), smart, tough as nails, wise – many of his ruminations on life contain a genuine profundity – an incorruptible being in an otherwise venial world… and funny: not Abe Lincoln but a droll wit particularly when chewing the fat with his buddy, Hawk.

Robert B Parker died in 2010 but he left behind 40 Spenser novels: I sense they may lead me to ruin other people’s future holidays.

Dave, Sean and Jimmy are childhood friends. But their friendship, and for Dave his childhood, ends when Dave is abducted from the street outside Sean’s house by two pedophiles posing as cops. 25 years later Dave and Jimmy are still living in the same neighbourhood, Dave in a dead end job, Jimmy running a local store. When Jimmy’s daughter, Katie, is murdered Sean, now a homicide cop with the state police, is assigned to the investigation.

Many of Lehane’s trademark concerns are in place in this book: violence against children and child abuse (as was the focus in Gone Baby, Gone); a strong Greene Catholic morality; life and community in working class Irish Boston; and, more lightheartedly, the vicissitudes of contemporary culture (In one passage Sean’s partner Whitey actually discusses who should play him in the movie version of the case. “Brian Dennehy” is his conclusion. He is ultimately played in Clint Eastwood’s movie by the great Laurence Fishburne, which would probably have annoyed Whitey…if he were a real person).

Like the Danish television series The Killing, which this book predates, it does the unusual thing in crime fiction of keeping a focus on the bereaved and the details of bereavement not just the investigation. It is also in many respects, another rarity, a character driven crime novel: alongside the compelling procedural account of Sean’s investigation is the story of the consequences of Katie’s killing on, in particular, Dave and Jimmy, and it is from this that much of the tension and dread in the novel derives.

Mystic River is a gripping, out of the ordinary crime novel, powerful and bleak. It is probably Dennis Lehane’s masterpiece: an exquisitely written exploration of violent crime and its consequences in a working class Massachusetts neighbourhood.

Note: SPOILERS for Gone, Baby, Gone below

It’s not definitive but this novel has an air of finality about it and seems likely to be the last of the Kenzie-Gennaro series. After ten years absence its good to have them back for a final bow, bringing some measure of conclusion both to their own story and that of Amanda McCready, the girl they sought to find in the fourth novel of the series “Gone Baby Gone”.

In this novel Patrick is contacted once again by Beatrice McCready who asks him to find her niece Amanda, who has gone missing again. Feeling a large measure of responsiblity for the devastation he previously brought to both Bea and Amanda’s lives he agrees. So once more he and Angie are drawn back into contact with the violence of Boston’s underworld, including a frightening crew of Eastern European gangsters.

The Kenzie-Gennaro series has always been very dark, but generally less bleak than other parts of Lehane’s work, such as Mystic River and Shutter Island. This is not least because of the warmth of the relationships between Patrick, Angie and their best friend Bubba. “Gone Baby Gone”, perhaps the most downbeat of the Kenzie-Gennaro books, is also probably the best novel of this fine series. But this book, like the rest of the series has much to recommend it: a humorous and engaging authorial voice, a gripping plot, and a strong sense of menace. The themes of redemption, situational versus societal morality and moral compromise though present here are probably less emphasised in this book in comparison with previous in the series and this may disappoint some readers. Nevertheless if this is to be the swansong of the characters I was happy with the way they leave the stage.

Some SPOILERS for “Gone Baby, Gone” below

This, the fifth of the Kenzie-Gennaro series, sees Patrick and Angie estranged, their personal relationship and professional partnership at an end following the devastating events portrayed in Gone Baby, Gone. Instead Patrick is working alone on routine missing persons cases when he finds that a former client has killed herself. Feeling guilty at having failed her Patrick decides to look into her death to find out just what happened. What transpires is a dangerous cat and mouse game with a psychopath whose particular modus operandi is the undermining of peoples’ lives and driving them to suicide.

There are strong echoes of the second Kenzie-Gennaro, Darkness Take My Hand, in the plot of this book. But the well trodden nature of the plot is probably secondary in this novel to the question of how Patrick and Angie begin to rebuild their personal and professional relationships. In addition, pleasingly, Bubba takes a more central role in this book, filling in large parts of his back story in the process.

So, not the best in the series, but still a fine outing with two of the most likeable gumshoes in literature.

The fourth, and arguably the best, of the Kenzie-Gennaro novels. (Certainly the best known due to Ben Affleck’s very fine cinema version of the story). Patrick and Angie, much against their better judgement, are drawn into the hunt for a missing girl, Amanda McCready, by Amanda’s aunt Beatrice.

This is a book in two parts. The first two thirds of the book are a compelling procedural as Angie and Patrick are reluctantly accepted as adjuncts to the police investigation into Amanda’s disapperance. In the final third Patrick and Angie finally, and to their utter dismay, manage to unravel the layers of deceit that surround the case.

In many ways this is the most horrific of the Kenzie-Gennaro series because its subject is the shockingly commonplace matter of child abuse and violence against children. Even the warmth of the relationships between Patrick, Angie and their friend Bubba is insufficient to stave off the bleakness for either the reader or the characters themselves. It is an angry book as well as being a hugely morally complex one, peppered with some fine humour (I particularly enjoy Patrick’s occasional vitriolic asides on movies and music) and some finely drawn sequences of violence.

In the third of the Kenzie-Gennaro novels, Patrick and Angie are hired by a dying billionaire, Trevor Stone, to find his daughter, Desiree, who has disappeared, unable, it seems, to bear the grief of a series of tragedies that have befallen her in recent months – most recently her father’s own impending death. In pursuing the case they follow the trail of Jay Becker, a fellow private investigator and friend who had trained Patrick but who has himself gone missing while seeking the missing Desiree.

The investigation takes them to Florida where, in spite of the sunshine and pastel colours, the darkness gathers.

The Catholic themes of the earlier Kenzie-Gennaro novels are less emphasized in this book. In their place there is a fast moving and exceptionally twisty story, where little is what it initially seems, and Patrick and Angie only have each other to depend on.

In the second of the Kenzie-Gennaro series Patrick and Angie are hired by a psychiatrist to keep an eye on her son, against whom the boyfriend of a client has made some unsubtle threats. What starts as a relatively straightforward babysitting job quickly degenerates into something much more nightmarish.

Key elements of this story, not least Patrick’s prison cell confrontation with a serial killer, are reminiscent of Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon – but this is Red Dragon from the perspective of the hunted with none of the risible anti-hero worship that became a central theme of the treatment of Hannibal Lecter in that series. Here the killers and their sub-Nietzchean notions are treated with the contempt they deserve.

There is a welcome reduction in wise-cracking in this novel compared to the first novel of the series, A Drink Before the War: a consequence, perhaps, of the characters aging disproportionately as a result of having survived their experiences in the earlier novel. Like its predecessor this novel is underpinned by Catholic notions of good, evil and redemption in situations where even hope is hard to see amid the violence.

Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are Boston private investigators operating out of an office in a church belfry in Dorchester. They get hired to undertake a seemingly easy case from three Massachusetts politicians: find a former cleaning woman who has stolen some sensitive documents from them. Of course the case turns out to be considerably less straightforward and vastly more dangerous than it initially appears.

This is the first of the celebrated Kenzie/Gennaro series and its voice, and that of Patrick, the narrator, is noticeably younger, certainly more wise-ass, than later novels of this series and later of Lehane’s other novels. In spite of this the novel offers a serious consideration of racial tensions in the Boston of the early 1990s in the guise of a very satisfying crime thriller. Typical of Lehane’s work it is run through with a strong sense of place and a Greene Catholic sensibility contemplating right, wrong and trying to discern the lesser of the evils in the midst of the routinised violence of poverty and criminal activity.