I can't remember the last time a novel gave me nightmares. I can read James Ellroy or Thomas Harris and drop into cozy sleep like a well-fed infant.

Then I read Dennis Lehane's books.

I read all five of them, from A Drink Before the War to the just-published Prayers for Rain, end to end, and woke gasping from dark dreams for a week. And I mean that as a compliment.

Lehane's novels featuring Boston private investigator Patrick Kenzie just plain kick ass. Along with complex characters, a vivid sense of place, mordant wit and hold-your-breath suspense, they are laced with a chillingly real sense of evil. The bad guys Kenzie battles are some of the creepiest, scariest villains I've ever encountered on the page.

Lehane's books are often compared to Robert B. Parker's Spenser series, and there are some resemblances. Both use Boston as a setting, of course, and Kenzie, like Spenser, has an intense but difficult relationship with a beautiful, bright woman, in Kenzie's case his partner, Angie Gennaro. Spenser and Kenzie also each rely on an utterly loyal friend who happens to be a professional killer, though Spenser's elegantly chilling pal Hawk is otherwise not much like Kenzie's id-unbound buddy Bubba Rogowski, a childhood friend whose military service led him to an outlaw career as an arms dealer. Both Parker and Lehane are witty writers and fine stylists, and both build their stories around social and moral concerns such as child abuse.

But Lehane is no dime-a-dozen imitator. He's the real deal. These books have a dark power that is all their own. Pick a week when you can afford to lose some sleep and wade into them.

A Drink Before the War (1994)

Lehane's first novel opens with a wry little nod to Raymond Chandler as Patrick Kenzie describes the outfit he's wearing to meet a powerful politician at the Ritz-Carlton Bar -- an echo of Philip Marlowe's introduction on the first page of The Big Sleep.

But even before that, Kenzie establishes his unique character in the prologue, which begins, "My earliest memories involve fire." It hints at his dark relationship with his father, a heroic firefighter, small-time politician and brutal abuser -- Kenzie's belly bears a burn scar inflicted by the fireman. He also bears, as much as he hates it, his father's propensity for violence, and that shadow side haunts him in all these books.

Violence also haunts his relationship with Angie -- not his own violence, but her husband's. Like Kenzie, Phil Gennaro has known Angie since grade school. Despite her toughness with other people -- she's a crack shot and ruthless street fighter -- she endures his drunken beatings because she's been in love with him most of her life. Kenzie's been in love with her since he met her in first grade. It's not the usual business partnership.

The politician who has summoned Kenzie to the Ritz is Sterling Mulkern, " a florid, beefy man, the kind who carried weight like a weapon, not a liability. He had a shock of stiff white hair you could land a DC-10 on and a handshake that stopped just short of inducing paralysis. He'd been state senate majority leader since the end of the Civil War or so, and he had no plans for retirement. ... He also had an affected Irish brogue that he'd somehow acquired growing up in South Boston."

Mulkern and his protégé, Brian Paulson, want to hire Kenzie to find Jenna Angeline, a cleaning woman for their office who has disappeared, they say, with some documents important to the passage of a bill they are sponsoring. Jenna, they say, lives in Dorchester, just as Kenzie has all his life.

But Kenzie lives in Irish Dorchester, and Jenna Angeline lives -- or last did -- in black Dorchester. Kenzie says, "In my Dorchester, you stay because of community and tradition, because you've built a comfortable, if somewhat poor, existence where little ever changes. A hamlet. In Jenna Angeline's Dorchester, you stay because you don't have any choice."

Kenzie finds Jenna easily enough, and he finds that what she took from the senators' office had nothing to do with the passage of a bill -- and that Jenna is afraid she'll be killed for it. And soon she is, right in front of Kenzie, which hurls him into a search for the reasons for her death that will bring him and Angie to confrontations with a terrifying gang leader, Marion Socia, and his equally terrifying son and rival, Raymond.

Darkness, Take My Hand (1996)

Kenzie and Angie are hired by psychiatrist Diandra Warren because she thinks her college-student son, Jason, is being stalked. The stalker, she believes, is the boyfriend of a former patient of hers. Scary, but not that surprising. But the supposed stalker is Kevin Hurlihy, a screaming psychotic who works for Jack Rouse, head of Boston's Irish branch of the Mafia. Kevin is also another of Kenzie and Angie's old schoolmates (some school they went to).

As likely a candidate as Kevin seems for the stalking, it's not that simple. Kevin and his boss say he has nothing to do with it, and they're pretty convincing. Kenzie and Angie tail Jason and find out he has an amazingly active sex life involving both men and women, but don't get any closer to identifying the stalker.

In the meantime, Kenzie runs into another friend from the old neighborhood, an aspiring actress named Kara Rider, and has an odd conversation with her. She seems to want help but can't quite ask and ends by warning Kenzie to be careful, though she can't say why.

A few days later, a woman is found dead in that old neighborhood, crucified to the ground with three-penny nails on Meeting House Hill. She's Kara Rider, and she has Kenzie's business card in her hand.

Her death is just the first in a dizzying series that leads Kenzie and the cops to an impossible conclusion. The murders bear the signature of those committed by serial killer Alec Hardiman. But Hardiman, the son of a homicide investigator, has been in prison for over 20 years.

Running the killer -- or killers -- to ground puts Kenzie's girlfriend Grace and her young daughter in deadly peril, almost costs Angie her life and plunges Kenzie into a piece of his family's past he doesn't want to know about. Darkness, Take My Hand is as harrowing as it is compelling.

Sacred (1997)

For starters, Kenzie and Angie, who have closed their office and are trying to recover from the events that ended Darkness, Take My Hand, are knocked unconscious and kidnapped from their own neighborhood. The kidnapper has a job for them: Find his missing daughter.

He is Trevor Stone, a fabulously rich man who, he tells them, has lost everything that matters. His wife was murdered by carjackers a few months before, and he was shot. When the doctors took the bullets out, they discovered he had terminal cancer. His beloved daughter, Desiree, was already reeling under those two shocks when a former lover drowned. Traumatized and depressed, she has disappeared, as has the first detective her father hired to find her.

He will pay Kenzie and Angie a great deal of money to find Desiree. Ready or not, they're back to work. The search takes them out of Boston to the Tampa Bay area, on the trail of Desiree's apparent connection with a questionable outfit called Grief Release, which bears a more than passing resemblance to Scientology.

They don't find Desiree, but they do find Jay Becker, the first detective (and an old boyfriend of Angie's -- these two know everyone in Boston). He slews their view of the case around 180 degrees before they lose him again in a hair-raising encounter atop the Sunshine Skyway bridge high over Tampa Bay. And when they eventually find the dangerously gorgeous Desiree, they wish they hadn't.

Gone, Baby, Gone (1998)

The whole city of Boston is looking for Amanda McCready. The angelic four-year-old vanished from her own bed one evening while her mother was next door watching television at a friend's house. Helene McCready, an unmarried high school dropout, is taking a beating in the press for leaving her daughter alone in an unlocked apartment for more than three hours so she could watch two sitcoms and a TV movie and get stoned with a pal.

But it's not Helene who wants to hire Kenzie and Angie to look for her daughter. It's her brother Lionel and his wife, Beatrice. They seem far more concerned with recovering Amanda than does Helene, who's only interested in watching herself on television in the role of stricken mother.

Kenzie isn't sure what they can do that the entire Boston police force can't, but they take the job. Digging into Helene's train wreck of a life, they find almost too many reasons someone might have taken Amanda, each more chilling than the last.

Working the case just as closely are a pair of police detectives, Nick Raftopoulos, called Poole, and Remy Broussard. Poole is a shrewd tough guy, Broussard a charming clotheshorse who's smarter than he looks.

They follow the same leads as Kenzie and Angie, those that take them deeper into the sordid worlds of drug dealers and sexual predators and beyond before the story reaches its shocking resolution.

Prayers for Rain (1999)

"The first time I met Karen Nichols," Kenzie says, "she struck me as the kind of woman who ironed her socks."

But the sunny Karen has a problem. A guy from her gym has been sexually harassing her, and she's scared. Her boyfriend sends her to Kenzie because he knows Angie, who has ended the partnership (in both senses) and gone to work for a corporate security firm.

Kenzie and his scary pal Bubba pay the harasser a persuasive visit, Karen says thanks and Kenzie thinks the case is wrapped up -- until a few months later, when he hears the news that Karen has dived off the roof of the Custom House.

Stricken by guilt -- he'd never answered an ambiguous phone call from her a few weeks before her suicide -- Kenzie goes looking for answers. He finds that in the months before her death Karen's life had become a nightmare. Her fiancée had been left comatose after being hit by a car, and she had gone broke after his health insurance turned out to have been mysteriously canceled.

Kenzie also finds that Karen's family has been struck by tragedy before. Her younger sister drowned in a pond behind the family home while only a toddler; her brilliant but unstable stepbrother has been estranged from the family for a decade.

Christopher Dawe, Karen's stepfather, is a successful surgeon, and he and his wife, Karen's mother, share a luxurious home and a shockingly cold attitude about Karen's death: "She died," Carrie Dawe said, "because she was weak."

But they are hardly the coldest characters Kenzie encounters. With Angie and Bubba soon in on the case, he looks for answers from Karen's psychiatrist, from the man who harassed her, and from a man who may or may not be her long-missing stepbrother.

What they find is a brilliant and seemingly invincible psychopath intent on destroying the Dawes, as well as the family secrets that may drive him. Carnage ensues, but it's only when a roll of tape falls off a shelf months later that, Kenzie says, "I saw the whole board."

As always, titles reviewed in Colette's List may be purchased at a significant discount from The Bookstall.

Colette's Archive

Colette's List 1: Hiaasen: Murder Under The Palms

Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder

Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover

Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels

Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business

Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville

Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women

Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.

Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller

Colette's List 10: Tony Hillerman: The Navajo Way

Colette's List 11: Small Towns, Mean Streets

Colette's List 12: James Lee Burke: Blood On The Bayou

Colette's List 13: Rick Harsch: Rust Belt Noir

Colette's List 14: Harrison: A Novel Worth Waiting For

Colette's List 15: Kingsolver: Power & Its Price

Colette's List 16: Macdonald: Secret Lusts & Terrible Revenge

Colette's List 17: Creating Colette: A Scandal In Paris

Colette's List 18: Rushdie: Shake, Rattle & Roll

Colette's List 19: Betrayal & Madness, Loss & Redemption

Colette's List 20: Summer Reading: Death Cruise

Colette Bancroft, a writer known at various times in her career to date as The Goddess of the Classroom, The Empress of Haute Cuisine and The Spitball Queen, is at work on a mystery novel of her own. She is an editor on the Metro Desk at the St. Petersburg Times.

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