Boston in the run up to the Independence Day. Patrick Kenzie is a private dick hired by local political big-wigs to run to ground black cleaning woman, Jenna Angeline. She vanished at the same time as some important Statehouse documents relating to the forthcoming Street Terrorism Bill, aimed at limiting gang-power on city streets.

Kenzie and his partner Anegla Gennaro come from the blue-collar neighbourhoods of the Dorchester; they can find their way into these racially tense streets and find Jenna if anyone can. And they do with little trouble. But Kenzie's suspicion of his paymasters' motives make him ask one question too many, and instead of handing Jenna over she ends up gunned-down in a shopping mall and the investigators on the run from the politicians and two rival gangs, all after what it was that Jenna Angeline found.

A Drink Before The War comes ladened down with the kind of praise a first novel usually has to beg for - "stylish", "hip", "assured", grace and intelligence" - and there is a surety to Lehane's plotting point-to-point that keeps things moving and the reader involved. But Lehane also has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing.

Kenzie narrates in what he perceives to be pure hardboiled, and from the outset it doesn't work. If it was meant ironically - which, Lehane being American, it surely isn't - then it might just work as a short story. Over the length of a novel it goes from nagging to downright irritating: "Richie is not one of those Hollywood blacks with skin like coffee regular and Billy Dee Williams eyes. He's black, black as an oil slick, and not what one would call handsome." This is crime fiction written by someone with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing visiting the mean streets in a fast car.

Worse is Lehane's - sorry, Kenzie's - thesis on race relations in the inner-city. The detective is big on showing-off his man-of-the-people act - there are good and bad on every side - but it gets a little too close at times to the odious "I'm not a racist, but..." Maybe the author is shooting for a little moral ambiguity to texture his novel, but he has none of the honesty or subtle depth of a Walter Mosley or the master of ethical responsibility, the genuinely dangerous Andrew Vachss.

Kenzie - surprise, surprise - has the hots for his partner, the same partner who can handle a hot pistol one minute and takes a regular beating from her Neanderthal husband the next. Lehane wants to be Raymond Chandler and address the American racial divide and tackle wife-beating all in the one book. He can write, he might even be able to do justice to any one of his subjects if he really tries, but, as Kenzie himself might say, he's trying to run before he can walk. And someone's tied his shoelaces together.