Publication Order of Kenzie & Gennaro Books
| A Drink Before the War | 1994 |
| Darkness, Take My Hand | 1996 |
| Sacred | 1997 |
| Gone, Baby, Gone | 1998 |
| Prayers for Rain | 1999 |
| Moonlight Mile | 2010 |
Publication Order of Coughlin Books
| The Given Day | 2008 |
| Live by Night | 2012 |
| World Gone By | 2015 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Mystic River | 2001 |
| Shutter Island | 2003 |
| The Drop | 2014 |
| Since We Fell | 2017 |
| Small Mercies | 2023 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Coronado | 2006 |
About Dennis Lehane
Dennis Lehane is an American crime novelist and screenwriter, born in Boston in 1965, whose books include “Mystic River”, “Shutter Island” and the Kenzie and Gennaro detective series. He has published fourteen novels, five of which have been made into films, and most of his fiction is set in and around Boston.
Lehane grew up in the Dorchester neighbourhood, the youngest of five children of Irish immigrants. His father was a foreman at Sears and his mother worked in a school cafeteria. He studied at Eckerd College in Florida, where he found his passion for writing, and then on the graduate creative writing programme at Florida International University.
His first novel, “A Drink Before the War” (1994), introduced the investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro and won the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel. Four more books about the pair appeared by 1999, and a sixth, “Moonlight Mile”, followed in 2010. The fourth, “Gone, Baby, Gone”, was filmed by Ben Affleck in 2007.
“Mystic River” (2001) won the Anthony and Barry awards for best novel and became a 2003 film directed by Clint Eastwood. Martin Scorsese filmed “Shutter Island” in 2010 with Leonardo DiCaprio as a US Marshal searching for a patient who has escaped from an island hospital for the criminally insane.
With “The Given Day” (2008) Lehane turned to historical fiction. The novel opens in 1918 and takes in the Boston police strike of 1919, and it began the Coughlin series, which continued with “Live by Night”, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel, and “World Gone By”. “The Drop” (2014) grew out of his short story “Animal Rescue”, which he also adapted as his first film screenplay.
Lehane wrote for the HBO series “The Wire” and later for “Boardwalk Empire”, “Mr. Mercedes” and “The Outsider”. He wrote and produced the Apple TV+ series “Black Bird” (2022) and “Smoke” (2025). His most recent novel, “Small Mercies” (2023), is set in South Boston in 1974 amid the violence over school busing, and he is adapting it as a limited television series.
Photo: David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).