Four years ago, Dennis Lehane '01, was headed to a movie with friends when his editor called with fantastic news. That Sunday, Stephen King's review of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" would appear in The New York Times Book Review. In it, King mentioned that the Potter series and "the superb detective novels of Dennis Lehane became a kind of lifeline" as he recovered from the accident that almost killed him.

Already, Lehane was established and highly respected. King's comment would launch his career into the stratosphere.

How did Lehane respond? "I got to leave," he told his editor. "I'm going to see The Perfect Storm ." It's not that he didn't care. He cared very much. In fact, when he got to the movie, he couldn't concentrate. But his natural instinct, his first reaction, was to keep moving.

It shows in his writing. Each new book departs from the one before-even within his five-book series featuring detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. He introduced the series with "A Drink Before the War." Of the ones that followed, he says: "Darkness, Take My Hand" was "an attempt to really blow the doors off the genre." "Sacred" was "wink-wink post modern," and in "Gone, Baby, Gone," Lehane says he "swung for the fences."

That's what is happening in contemporary noir-writers are bending the form. Critics say Lehane is at the forefront, along with James Ellroy, George P. Pelecanos, Michael Connelly and others.

After his fourth book, Lehane was ready to break from the private-eye series and write " Mystic River ." But his publisher and friends put on the brakes.

You can't do that to your fans, they said. It's too evil. At the end of "Gone, Baby, Gone," the detectives had broken up, they had lost the case and everything had gone to hell. So Lehane slowed down long enough to write "Prayers for Rain," the fifth and final (he thinks) installment.

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