A new Lehane drama that I would call “Mystic River Lite”

A bleak story filled with flawed individuals trying to survive in a flawed society, expertly written in the dark and violent tone of Mystic River but somehow lacking the heart and soul and depth of that brilliant novel. Lehane created The Drop from a screenplay, which in turn was forged from a short story Lehane had written but shelved a decade ago.

The story centers around Bob Saginowski, an emotionally-damaged guy who tends bar in his cousin’s crime-linked pub, devoutly attends church services on Sundays, and dreams of the life he knows he will never have. His cousin Marv, a former gang leader who lost his bar years ago to the violent Chechen gangster that runs this part of Boston, lets his place be used as a “drop” for the Chechen’s ill-gotten gains, but dreams of a big score that will return him to his former “glory.”

When the bar is robbed by two loser brothers, the Chechens retaliate with bloody force, and tensions quickly ratchet up. Bob has meanwhile found a badly-beaten puppy tossed into the trashcan of a neighbor, and discovers a new reason for living—the dog Rocco and the sad broken neighbor Nadia. Sensing Bob’s vulnerability, the dog’s former owner—a brutal and brutalized sociopath ex-con—tries to blackmail Bob over his attachment to the dog and to Nadia, while a devout local cop with serious issues of his own, is convinced Bob is hiding a past crime because of his years’-long refusal to take communion. Cousin Marv makes his desperate play, with disastrous consequences.

And here’s where the story goes awry. Because Bob is kind of a lost soul with a good heart, almost childlike, at the beginning of the novel, until we learn some things about him from his past which make us uncomfortable, to say the least. And when the shit hits the fan, Bob inexplicably becomes someone else entirely. Marv, who begins the novel as a self-pitying loser, ends the novel as a Carl Hiaasen-style bumbler, a seriously disconcerting mischaracterization for a writer normally as subtle as Lehane. Nadia, who represents a key turning point for Bob in the story, is never developed enough for the reader to get into her head, while the cop and the sociopath ex-con who terrorizes Nadia and Bob get much fuller back stories.

Knowing that the novel was generated from a short story, one gets the distinct impression that Lehane wasn’t quite sure how to extend his story into a full-length drama and ends up falling back on some rather unnecessarily gruesome scenes to fill in the gaps.

However, this is still Dennis Lehane and, as such, The Drop is a worthy read. Looking forward to Lehane’s next novel with anticipation.