Fiction writer Dennis Lehane has been widely praised for his gritty crime novels featuring the Boston police detective partners Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. However, he "hit the big time in 2001 with Mystic River, which quickly became a bestseller," a reviewer for the Economist explained. Mystic River, the story of three Boston, Massachusetts boyhood friends and a crime that ultimately tears apart their ethnic city neighborhood, has also been turned into a popular film under the direction of Clint Eastwood.

"There was never any doubt in Dennis Lehane's mind that he was going to be a writer," stated January contributor Linda Richards. "It wasn't much a matter of 'if' as much as 'how' and 'when.'" The son of working-class Irish immigrants, Lehane grew up in Boston during the 1970s and 1980s "with a sense that life was hard and unfair and you just tried your best," as...