GONE, BABY, GONE by Dennis Lehane

I love a thriller with a moral delimma, and Gone, Baby, Gone fits the bill. This is my third Dennis Lehane novel, although he wrote this one earlier than the other two. Like Mystic River, a central theme of the plot is crimes against children. There seems to be a pattern among his books that I've read, since even in Shutter Island a mother drowned her children. In this case the story is about the abduction of a child from a criminally neglectful mother. Throughout this page-turner, I wasn't certain whether to root for the detectives trying to solve the case or not, because it was obvious that death might be a better fate for the child than a reunion with her mother. I have to say that the ending was not a huge surprise, although there were several red herrings along the way that kept me guessing.