Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Barnes and Noble Best Book of the Year

Bookpage Best of 2017

Booklist Best Crime Novel

PopSugar Best Book of 2017

The new novel from New York Times bestseller Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River and Shutter Island

“Lehane is the master of complex human characters thrust into suspenseful, page-turning situations.” —Gillian Flynn

Since We Fell follows Rachel Childs, a former journalist who, after an on-air mental breakdown, now lives as a virtual shut-in. In all other respects, however, she enjoys an ideal life with an ideal husband. Until a chance encounter on a rainy afternoon causes that ideal life to fray. As does Rachel’s marriage. As does Rachel herself. Sucked into a conspiracy thick with deception, violence, and possibly madness, Rachel must find the strength within herself to conquer unimaginable fears and mind-altering truths. By turns heart- breaking, suspenseful, romantic, and sophisticated, Since We Fell is a novel of profound psychological insight and tension. It is Dennis Lehane at his very best.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062129383
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/09/2017
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	658,580
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Dennis Lehane is the author of ten previous 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 lives in California with his family.

Julia Whelan is a screenwriter, lifelong actor, and award-winning audiobook narrator. She graduated with a degree in English and creative writing from Middlebury College and Oxford University. While she was in England, her flirtation with tea blossomed into a full-blown love affair, culminating in her eventual certification as a tea master. 

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

Website:

http://www.dennislehanebooks.com

Editorial Reviews

[Lehane] remains one of the great, diabolical thriller kings who seems intimately acquainted with darkness and can make it seep from the page or screen.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

03/27/2017
Set in contemporary Boston, this expertly wrought character study masquerading as a thriller from Edgar-winner Lehane (World Gone By) features his first-ever female protagonist. Once a star journalist, until something snapped during her TV coverage of the devastation in Haiti following the 2009 earthquake, Rachel Childs now barely leaves her house. Lehane portrays the frantic hamster wheel of waxing and waning anxiety with unnerving clarity. A lifetime of tension, much of it spawning from her now-deceased mother’s refusal to disclose the identity of Rachel’s father, weighs on Rachel. The quest to put a name to half her DNA is what first sets Rachel on a collision course with Brian Delacroix, a PI (or so he claims) who advises her against the whole thing. Fast forward several years, and Rachel and Brian meet again. Their eventual marriage is romantic and life-affirming, as Brian coaxes Rachel through the swamp of her psyche, until it’s suddenly not. The book’s conspiracy plot doesn’t cut the deepest; it’s Lehane’s intensely intimate portrayal of a woman tormented by her own mind. 15-city tour. Agent: Ann Rittenberg, Ann Rittenberg Literary. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Endlessly surprising. . . . [A] twisty tale.

Wall Street Journal

[Lehane] remains one of the great, diabolical thriller kings who seems intimately acquainted with darkness and can make it seep from the page.

New York Times

A pleasantly twisted character study and a love story. . . . Lehane is in command of what he’s doing.

Tampa Bay Times

Make no mistake, Since We Fell is crime fiction, filled with con men, murder, greed and revenge. But the love story gives this novel its heart.

Associated Press Staff

[Lehane’s] work always combines pulp thrills with literary heart and sophistication.

Entertainment Weekly

Another winner from the author of Mystic River. . . . A raucous mix of lust, greed, and betrayal.

AARP Magazine

The surfeit of plot twists and emotional baggage are buoyed by Lehane’s hard-boiled lyricism and peerless feel for New England noir.” 

USA Today

[Since We Fell] should have crime fiction fans busting out the bottle rockets and champagne. . . . It’s impossible not to succumb.

Lithub

With sharply acute characterization, this is classic Lehane.

The Guardian

A ride you won’t want to miss.

New York Journal of Books

A pleasantly twisted character study and a love story. . . . Lehane is in command of what he’s doing.

Washington Post

A riveting exercise in psychological suspense.

Providence Journal

Lehane writes expert, compelling thrillers. . . . He’s one of the game changers who smashed the imaginary boundary between genre and literature, proving that we can have the best of both at once.

Tana French

The most thrilling novel I’ll read all year. Since We Fell is simmering with emotion, menace, and humor. I loved it.

Kate Atkinson

The mystery and intrigue never let go; the twists and turns are engaging and unexpected all the way down the track.

James Lee Burke

Complex, tense, compelling, and an emotional and strategic hall of mirrors, where nothing is what it seems—but I would follow Dennis Lehane anywhere.

Lee Child

Lehane has written two books-one, an insightful examination of the search for identity and belonging, and two, a thriller that constantly leaves you guessing-and then smashed them together into one terrific read.

Gillian Flynn

One doesn’t ‘read’ Since We Fell so much as plunge and tumble through its pages like a raft in white water. A sweet bullet of a book.

Richard Price

Once you pick up a Dennis Lehane novel, you’re hooked. It’s just that simple. Since We Fell is a complex, compelling, page-turner of a novel from a master storyteller at the top of his game.

Kristin Hannah

02/15/2017
After covering tragic events in Haiti, reporter Rachel Childs suffers a mental breakdown on live TV and is fired. Her public trauma leads to divorce and severe agoraphobia. Almost two years later, she has remarried and is finally starting to recover—until the day she spots her husband, Brian, who is supposedly out of the country. When she confronts him, Brian convinces her otherwise, and facts seem to support his story and the existence of a doppelgänger. When a mysterious friend of Brian's reappears and divulges new information, she finally follows Brian and his true betrayal is revealed. Rachel's life careens into a nightmare and a fight for her life as she discovers the depth of his deception. The first third of this book details Rachel's background and reads like literary fiction. The latter portion ventures into thriller territory. Rachel's fully-developed character grounds the suspense to ease this shift, and Lehane (Shutter Island; Live by Night) writes with a smooth ease that makes the pages fly by. VERDICT Readers will enjoy going along for the ride in this engrossing story about love, deception, and marital commitment. [See Prepub Alert, 11/7/16.]—Emily Byers, Salem P.L., OR

Library Journal

★ 2017-02-06
Don't zoom through this latest entry in Lehane's illustrious body of work. You'll miss plenty of intrigue, intricacies, and emotional subtleties.The clinical term for what ails journalist Rachel Childs is "agoraphobia." Even if the term didn't appear twice in the novel, it'd be easy enough for the reader to identify—and identify with—her pain thanks to Lehane's delicate, incisive rendering of her various symptoms. They include panic, rage, depression, and, most of all, self-loathing. ("That's who I've become," she thinks to herself. "A creature below contempt.") The reasons behind Rachel's breakdown are likewise cataloged in short, vivid strokes: a childhood spent mostly with her brittle, brilliant mother who refused to tell her anything at all about her father, leading to a yearslong search for that father culminating in desolation and heartbreak. The coup de grâce to Rebecca's self-esteem comes when her meteoric rise to prominence as a Boston TV reporter literally crashes from her on-camera nervous collapse while covering the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Through all these jolts and traumas, one person is always around, whether close or from a distance: Brian Delacroix, a witty, handsome Canadian-born businessman whom she first meets as a private investigator, later through his occasional "keep-your-chin-up" e-mails, and then, after she's all but locked herself away in her apartment, outside a South End bar. Brian gradually becomes the only one who can even begin to draw Rachel out of her deep blue funk, first as a confidant, then as a lover, and finally as her husband. Happily ever after? You know there's no such thing in a Lehane novel if you've dived into such rueful, knotty narratives as Mystic River (2001), Shutter Island (2003), and World Gone By (2015). It spoils nothing to disclose that Brian isn't quite who Rachel thinks he is. But as she discovers when she tentatively, gradually subdues her demons to seek the truth, Rachel isn't quite who she thinks she is either. What seems at the start to be an edgy psychological mystery seamlessly transforms into a crafty, ingenious tale of murder and deception—and a deeply resonant account of one woman's effort to heal deep wounds that don't easily show.

Kirkus Reviews

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