(Beacon News, Jan. 18, Teresa Budasi)

My favorite of 2008 is the latest novel by Wally Lamb. A decade has passed since Lamb was doubly blessed by Oprah and shot to literary fame. In 1997, the talk show queen chose his first novel, “She’s Come Undone,” as her fourth Oprah’s Book Club selection. His follow-up, “I Know This Much Is True,” was chosen a year later.

So now, 10 years later, comes “The Hour I First Believed,” which supposes the life of a couple trying to put back the pieces of their lives in the wake of the Columbine High School tragedy. Books like this are my favorite kind to read — novels with long, sprawling chapters, where characters are thoughtfully drawn out with multiple, interconnecting story lines — so that’s why it tops my list. It’s a hefty volume, 700-plus pages, and I look forward to every single page turn. (Editor’s note: Sugar Grove resident Greg Zanis, who famously and controversially built and installed crosses near Columbine after the shootings, is mentioned in this fictionalized account.)

So now, 10 years later, comes “The Hour I First Believed,” which supposes the life of a couple trying to put back the pieces of their lives in the wake of the Columbine High School tragedy. Books like this are my favorite kind to read — novels with long, sprawling chapters, where characters are (more…)

(mcherald.com, Nov. 22, JC Patterson)

Here’s a by-the-book breakdown of fine reads I have known and appreciated this year.

The Big Boys: Heavyweight hits like Richard Price’s Lush Life, The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski , and my favorite read of 2008: The Given Day by Dennis Lehane, topped bestseller lists and Oprah’s Bookclub. These massive parables of crime, historical cops and a boy and his dogs are flat out brilliant.

Lady Killers: A bevy of female authors, featuring Nevada Barr‘s long-awaited Winter Study gave the female lead muscles aplenty. Also impressive is April Smith’s The Judas Horse and Andrea Kane‘s Twisted. Like Barr’s Anna Pigeon, both spotlight damaged amazons who work outside the law. Powerful period dramas like The Outlander by Gil Adamson and Ron Rash’s Serena use the (more…)

(Publisher’s Weekly, Nov. 3, Best Books of The Year Award)

In a splended flowering of the talent previously demonstrated in his crime fiction (Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River) Lehane combines 20th-century American history, a gripping story of a family torn by pride and the strictures of the Catholic Church, and the plot of a multifaceted thriller.

Order your signed first edition copy of The Given Day from www.vjbooks.com today!

(www.miamiherald.com, Nov. 14, Nancy Klingener)

The question comes at every one of Dennis Lehane‘s public appearances: “Will you ever return to Patrick and Angie?”

The answer is probably “No.”

”It’s been nine years, and I love those characters,” says Lehane, who appears Saturday at Miami Book Fair International. “But they stopped talking to me, not the other way around. I just can’t seem to get them on the phone.”

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro were the heroes of Lehane’s first five novels, private-eye tales set in contemporary Boston. They were successful books, and Lehane’s publisher would have happily kept putting them out.

Most writers, having found a successful niche, would keep working it. But Lehane, a graduate of Florida International University’s creative writing program, had different stories to tell, bigger stories. The first was Mystic River, a bestseller made into an Oscar-winning movie by Clint Eastwood.

Then he traveled into the past with the thriller Shutter Island, set in 1954 (more…)