Twelve years after Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro found Amanda McCready, she's missing again, possibly giving the couple a chance to make up for the damage they did by doing the right thing the first time Amanda disappeared.
In Dennis Lehane's 1998 novel, "Gone Baby Gone," Beatrice McCready turned to Kenzie and Gennaro - a pair of private investigators - after her 4-year-old niece disappeared. The couple eventually solved the mystery, after discovering the child's terrible home life and drug-addict mother.
Turns out it wasn't a kidnapping, but a case of taking the child so she could be placed in a loving home with a couple devoted to raising her.
Returning Amanda to her mother was the right thing to do, according to the law, but was it the right thing to do under the circumstances?
In Lehane's new novel, "Moonlight Mile," Amanda has gone missing again, and Gennaro and Kenzie can mull the decision they made.
"If Beatrice isn't crazy," she said, "and Amanda really is missing again, we've got a second chance."
"No," I said, "we do not."
"You don't even know what I was going to say."
"Yes I do. You were going to suggest that if we somehow manage to locate Amanda McCready then this time we can make up for the sins of our past."
It's just one of the questions that Kenzie, now married to Gennaro and a father himself, is forced to face in "Moonlight Mile."
As with the earlier novel, Lehane's new book is so much more than a mystery.
Drug dealers, Russian gangsters and a mentally unstable crime boss and his wife provide a colorful and dangerous backdrop for a tale of wrong and right and how seldom there are clear-cut, simple matters.
"Moonlight Mile" provides the twists and thrills that mystery lovers crave, and so much more in a sequel that is certainly the equal of its predecessor.
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