Reading Sacred by Dennis Lehane is a strange experience. The first two-thirds is magnificent. The prose, as always, shows why Lehane is praised as a great stylist. The book offers good characters and surprising plot twists.

Then the book goes into a horrible nosedive of clichés and implausible plot twists. It almost seems Lehane had a checklist of the worst clichés of the field and managed to get them all in.

• Beautiful women cannot be trusted. Check.
• Even the best men can be manipulated into doing the worst things by a beautiful woman. Check.
• The villain kills dozens of people without hesitation, but when she wants to kill the protagonist, she instead ties him up and explains her diabolical schemes until he can be rescued. Check.
• If the protagonist has a partner who might rescue him, the murderer will pass up the chance to kill that partner, leaving the partner imprisoned but unguarded. Check.
• Everyone younger than 25 is either stupid or evil. Check.
• Young people who accuse older people of sex crimes are manipulative and untrustworthy. Check.
• Any youth who claims to have been raped by a parent is lying; parents never do those things, and besides, the children secretly want it. Check.
• Young women have lots of sex with older men. Check.

It doesn't stop. The entire last third of the book just goes on like this. I wanted to take the novel back to the bookstore and get a refund, but I had already written in the margins of the book. You can imagine what I wrote around this dialogue:

  "I need your verbal consent, and - "
  "My what?"
  "You need to tell us it's okay to call you back later. …"
  "Hey, do I like win a prize or something?"

Gee, can you guess which speaker is supposed to be younger than 25? Shìt. Can you even imagine a professional novelist giving a middle-aged character lines like this:

"But she, man, she came over here, like, supposedly to buy some weed, you know? And, man, she, I gotta tell ya, she, well, wow, is all I can say." [sic]

Dennis Lehane, you owe me an apology and $7.99 plus tax.

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For more on Lehane, read Attacking Child Victims

For more on mystery novels, check out Crime Against Youth.

For more on the use of sex in attacking youth, read Looking at Our Women.