Coronado

Now available with a contemporary look, a must-have collection of riveting short stories from the New York Times bestselling author of Mystic River and Shutter Island.

“Locations are vivid and crisp, characters are memorable and, most importantly, the story lines dig into you and leave their mark.” —Boston Herald

When it comes to contemporary crime fiction there’s no territory quite as dangerous and unpredictable as that of New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane. These five short stories and a play are Lehane at his visceral best.

In “Running Out of Dog,” a vet returning from Vietnam is asked to redirect the violent skills he learned overseas to deal with his hometown’s rampant population of strays. “ICU” follows a hunted man who finds refuge in the oddest place imaginable. Surprises await a gang of Texas high-school football jocks who lay siege to a luxury home in the suburbs in “Gone Down to Corpus.” And in “Mushrooms,” a simple theft triggers a series of murders that forces a disillusioned young girl to consider her next move. This collection also includes “Until Gwen” and its stage adaptation, Coronado, which expands on the trenchant tale of a morally bankrupt conman father, his ill-fated son, and the woman they have in common.

 In Lehane’s capable hands, each story faces unflinchingly the darkest depths of the human experience—sin and redemption, loss and longing, flesh and blood—delivering a knockout punch that’ll have readers reeling.

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Coronado

Now available with a contemporary look, a must-have collection of riveting short stories from the New York Times bestselling author of Mystic River and Shutter Island.

“Locations are vivid and crisp, characters are memorable and, most importantly, the story lines dig into you and leave their mark.” —Boston Herald

When it comes to contemporary crime fiction there’s no territory quite as dangerous and unpredictable as that of New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane. These five short stories and a play are Lehane at his visceral best.

In “Running Out of Dog,” a vet returning from Vietnam is asked to redirect the violent skills he learned overseas to deal with his hometown’s rampant population of strays. “ICU” follows a hunted man who finds refuge in the oddest place imaginable. Surprises await a gang of Texas high-school football jocks who lay siege to a luxury home in the suburbs in “Gone Down to Corpus.” And in “Mushrooms,” a simple theft triggers a series of murders that forces a disillusioned young girl to consider her next move. This collection also includes “Until Gwen” and its stage adaptation, Coronado, which expands on the trenchant tale of a morally bankrupt conman father, his ill-fated son, and the woman they have in common.

 In Lehane’s capable hands, each story faces unflinchingly the darkest depths of the human experience—sin and redemption, loss and longing, flesh and blood—delivering a knockout punch that’ll have readers reeling.

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Coronado

Coronado

by Dennis Lehane
Coronado

Coronado

by Dennis Lehane

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Overview

Now available with a contemporary look, a must-have collection of riveting short stories from the New York Times bestselling author of Mystic River and Shutter Island.

“Locations are vivid and crisp, characters are memorable and, most importantly, the story lines dig into you and leave their mark.” —Boston Herald

When it comes to contemporary crime fiction there’s no territory quite as dangerous and unpredictable as that of New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane. These five short stories and a play are Lehane at his visceral best.

In “Running Out of Dog,” a vet returning from Vietnam is asked to redirect the violent skills he learned overseas to deal with his hometown’s rampant population of strays. “ICU” follows a hunted man who finds refuge in the oddest place imaginable. Surprises await a gang of Texas high-school football jocks who lay siege to a luxury home in the suburbs in “Gone Down to Corpus.” And in “Mushrooms,” a simple theft triggers a series of murders that forces a disillusioned young girl to consider her next move. This collection also includes “Until Gwen” and its stage adaptation, Coronado, which expands on the trenchant tale of a morally bankrupt conman father, his ill-fated son, and the woman they have in common.

 In Lehane’s capable hands, each story faces unflinchingly the darkest depths of the human experience—sin and redemption, loss and longing, flesh and blood—delivering a knockout punch that’ll have readers reeling.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061849961
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 10/13/2009
Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
Format: eBook
Pages: 240
Sales rank: 105,622
File size: 389 KB

About the Author

About The Author

Dennis Lehane is the author of thirteen novels—including the New York Times bestsellers Live by Night; Moonlight Mile; Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; and The Given Day—as well as Coronado, a collection of short stories and a play. He grew up in Boston, MA and now lives in California with his family.

Hometown:

Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:

August 4, 1965

Place of Birth:

Dorchester, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A., Eckerd College, 1988; M.F.A., Florida International University, 1993

Read an Excerpt

Coronado LP


By Dennis Lehane

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Dennis Lehane
All right reserved.

ISBN: 0061145963

Chapter One

This thing with Blue and the dogs and Elgin Bern happened a while back, a few years after some of our boys--like Elgin Bern and Cal Sears--came back from Vietnam, and a lot of others--like Eddie Vorey and Carl Joe Carol, the Stewart cousins--didn't. We don't know how it worked in other towns, but that war put something secret in our boys who returned. Something quiet and untouchable. You sensed they knew things they'd never say, did things on the sly you'd never discover. Great cardplayers, those boys, able to bluff with the best, let no joy show in their face no matter what they were holding.

A small town is a hard place to keep a secret, and a small southern town with all that heat and all those open windows is an even harder place than most. But those boys who came back from overseas, they seemed to have mastered the trick of privacy. And the way it's always been in this town, you get a sizeable crop of young, hard men coming up at the same time, they sort of set the tone.

So, not long after the war, we were a quieter town, a less trusting one (or so some seemed to think), and that's right when tobacco money and textile money reached a sort of critical mass and created construction money and pretty soon there was talk that our small town should maybe get a little bigger,maybe build something that would bring in more tourist dollars than we'd been getting from fireworks and pecans.

That's when some folks came up with this Eden Falls idea--a big carnival-type park with roller coasters and water slides and such. Why should all those Yankees spend all their money in Florida? South Carolina had sun too. Had golf courses and grapefruit and no end of KOA campgrounds.

So now a little town called Eden was going to have Eden Falls. We were going to be on the map, people said. We were going to be in all the brochures. We were small now, people said, but just you wait. Just you wait.

And that's how things stood back then, the year Perkin and Jewel Lut's marriage hit a few bumps and Elgin Bern took up with Shelley Briggs and no one seemed able to hold onto their dogs.

The problem with dogs in Eden, South Carolina, was that the owners who bred them bred a lot of them. Or they allowed them to run free where they met up with other dogs of opposite gender and achieved the same result. This wouldn't have been so bad if Eden weren't so close to I-95, and if the dogs weren't in the habit of bolting into traffic and fucking up the bumpers of potential tourists.

The mayor, Big Bobby Vargas, went to a mayoral conference up in Beaufort, where the governor made a surprise appearance to tell everyone how pissed off he was about this dog thing. Lot of money being poured into Eden these days, the governor said, lot of steps being taken to change her image, and he for one would be goddamned if a bunch of misbehaving canines was going to mess all that up.

"Boys," he'd said, looking Big Bobby Vargas dead in the eye, "they're starting to call this state the Devil's Kennel 'cause of them pooch corpses along the interstate. And I don't know about you-all, but I don't think that's a real pretty name."

Big Bobby told Elgin and Blue he'd never heard anyone call it the Devil's Kennel in his life. Heard a lot worse, sure, but never that. Big Bobby said the governor was full of shit. But, being the governor and all, he was sort of entitled.

The dogs in Eden had been a problem going back to the twenties and a part-time breeder named J. Mallon Ellenburg who, if his arms weren't up to their elbows in the guts of the tractors and combines he repaired for a living, was usually lashing out at something--his family when they weren't quick enough, his dogs when the family was. J. Mallon Ellenburg's dogs were mixed breeds and mongrels and they ran in packs, as did their offspring, and several generations later, those packs still moved through the Eden night like wolves, their bodies stripped to muscle and gristle, tense and angry, growling in the dark at J. Mallon Ellenburg's ghost.

Big Bobby went to the trouble of measuring exactly how much of 95 crossed through Eden, and he came up with 2.8 miles. Not much really, but still an average of .74 dog a day or 4.9 dogs a week. Big Bobby wanted the rest of the state funds the governor was going to be doling out at year's end, and if that meant getting rid of five dogs a week, give or take, then that's what was going to get done.

"On the QT," he said to Elgin and Blue, "on the QT, what we going to do, boys, is set up in some trees and shoot every canine who gets within barking distance of that interstate."

Elgin didn't much like this "we" stuff. First place, Big Bobby'd said "we" that time in Double O's four years ago. This was before he'd become mayor, when he was nothing more than a county tax assessor who shot pool at Double O's every other night, same as Elgin and Blue. But one night, after Harlan and Chub Uke had roughed him up over a matter of some pocket change, and knowing that neither Elgin nor Blue was too fond of the Uke family either, Big Bobby'd said, "We going to settle those boys' asses tonight," and started running his mouth the minute the brothers entered the bar.

Time the smoke cleared, Blue had a broken hand, Harlan and Chub were curled up on the floor, and Elgin's lip was busted. Big Bobby, meanwhile, was . . .

Continues...


Excerpted from Coronado LP by Dennis Lehane Copyright © 2006 by Dennis Lehane. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Though best known for his hugely successful novels such as Mystic River and Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane has been publishing his short stories in a wide variety of publications for years. "Until Gwen" was published in the Atlantic Monthly in June, 2005, and has been adapted into the play Coronado that opened in Manhattan in November, 2005. "Running Out of Dog" was featured in the anthologies Best American Mystery Stories 2005, as well as Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. Now, in this collection, Dennis has compiled the best of his previously published short stories, plus one completely new tale.

Full of the same riveting storytelling that has made his novels so popular, as well as some more literary material, this collection of Dennis Lehane's short stories is sure to satisfy the large fanbase he has developed.

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