The Drop by Dennis Lehane

 

A pretty good little novel, barely 200 pages, but dense and tangled. Lots of characters with hidden depths and other sorts of secrets, which works in this novel because Lehane spends the whole time in various degrees of tight third-person--there's no sense of a character either actively lying or carefully not thinking about whatever secrets the author wants to hold onto as long as possible. The underbelly of Boston Lehane describes feels plausibly right, at least from the POV of the characters in the novel. It's a novel about change in a lot of ways, but most of the character-change in it is death, the city and its underbelly just persist in churning. Witty and clever but eventually kinda grim.