Product Description

When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever.

Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay -- demons that urge him to do terrible things. When Jimmy's daughter is found murdered, Sean is assigned to the case. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy, who finds his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered in someone else's blood.

A tense and unnerving psychological thriller, Mystic River is also an epic novel of love and loyalty, faith and family, in which people irrevocably marked by the past find themselves on a collision course with the darkest truths of their own hidden selves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20048 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-01
• Released on: 2003-07-22
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Amazon.com's Best of 2001
Ever since blasting onto the literary scene with the Shamus Award-winning A Drink Before the War, Dennis Lehane has been the golden boy of noir. His Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro novels are marvels of tight pacing, dialogue so good it gets under your skin and stays there, with dead-on portrayals of working-class Boston neighborhoods. Sure, he's the oft-proclaimed, hard-boiled heir to Hammett and Chandler, but Lehane also takes a page from the Hemingway school of hyper-intense writing. He pares away and pares away until he's left with the absolute essentials--and then those essentials just explode off the page.

In his five Kenzie-Gennaro novels, the detective duo is at the nexus of Lehane's big bang. Darkly funny and just this side of jaded, Angie and Patrick move through Dorchester's bleak streets with an assurance born of familiarity. It's impossible to imagine these streets without the pair, or to imagine the pair away from those streets. Mystic River, then, arrives as a bit of a gamble, as Lehane moves from the sharp edges of portraiture to the broader strokes of landscape. No Angie, no Patrick: this neighborhood is on its own. It's not any prettier and certainly no friendlier, and its working-class façade still barely masks the irresistible tug of violent ways, means, and ends.

Twenty-five years ago, Dave Boyle got into a car. When he came back four days later, he was different in a way that destroyed his friendship with Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus. Now Sean's a cop, Jimmy's a store owner with a prison record and mob connections, and Dave's trying hard to keep his demons safely submerged. When Jimmy's daughter Katie is found murdered, each of the men must confront a past that none is eager to acknowledge. Lehane tugs delicately on the strands that weave this neighborhood together, testing for their strengths and weaknesses; this novel seems as much anthropological case study as thriller.

By turns violent and pensive, Mystic River is vintage Lehane. How good is it? You may go in missing Angie and Patrick, but after a few pages you won't even realize they're gone. Lehane's noir is still black magic. --Kelly Flynn

From Publishers Weekly
Lehane ventures beyond his acclaimed private eye series with this emotionally wrenching crime drama about the effects of a savage killing on a tightly knit, blue-collar Boston neighborhood. Written with a sensitivity toward character that exceeds his previous efforts, the story tracks the friendship of three boys from a defining moment in their childhood, when 11-year-old Dave Boyle was abducted off the streets of East Buckingham and sexually molested by two men before managing to escape. Boyle, Jimmy Marcus and Sean Devine grow apart as the years pass, but a quarter century later they are thrust back together when Marcus's 19-year-old daughter, Katie, is murdered in a local park. Marcus, a reformed master thief turned family man, goes through a period of intense grief, followed by a thirst for revenge. Devine, now a homicide cop assigned to the murder, tries to control his old friend while working to make sense of the baffling case, which involves turning over the past as much as it does sifting through new evidence. In time, Devine begins to suspect Boyle, a man of many ghoulish secrets who has led a double life ever since the molestation. Lehane's story slams the reader with uncomfortable images, a beautifully rendered setting and an unnerving finale. With his sixth novel, the author has replaced the graphic descriptions of crime and violence found in his Patrick Kenzie-Angela Gennaro series (Prayers for Rain; Gone, Baby, Gone) with a more pensive, inward view of life's dark corners. It's a change that garners his themesAregret over life choices, the psychological imprints of childhood, personal and professional compromiseAa richer context and his characters a deeper exploration. Agent, Ann Rittenberg. (Feb. 6) Forecast: Given the excitement in-house at Morrow that this is Lehane's breakthrough book, and the promotion they're placing behind it, it stands an excellent chance of leaping straight onto the bestseller lists. A one-day laydown, $250,000 ad-promo and an 11-city author tour, plus a blurb from Michael Connelly designating Lehane as "the heir apparent," should provide the groundwork for explosive sales. Rights have been sold in the U.K., France and Germany, and there will be a large-print edition as well as an audio from Harper Audio.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker
Back in the seventies, two boys from the Flats, wily Jimmy Marcus and sad-eyed Dave Boyle, hung around with Sean Devine, who lived twelve blocks away in what passed for a better neighborhood. This Chandleresque novel really starts when their paths cross again: Sean's a cop, Jimmy's daughter is dead, and Dave's a suspect. Lehane's theme is inevitability: once fate has its markers in place, it doesn't fool around. A sense of foreboding provokes the book's best heart-in-your-mouth effects, but the assignment of blame is clear long before the final pages.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

MYSTIC RIVER
Sean is the most level headed of the three friends. Jimmy is the bold and daring leader, the bad influence. Dave is happy just to be a part of the threesome, never quite feeling like he is worthy of their friendship and continuously strategizing to keep his place among the trio. They are all eleven years old.

One day two men posing as police stop the three boys from fighting in the street. It is no surprise that Dave is the one ultimately lured into their car. This incident had me thinking... Yes, the fact that Dave got into the backseat of that car certainly resulted in changing his life. However, if it wasn't that particular incident, there would have been another similar incident, because that was who Dave was. Hence this question: Can a minor decision change the entire direction of your life? Or, on the other hand, does who you are direct and mandate the changes and direction that your life takes?

Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective, Jimmy is an ex-con; married with three daughters, and Dave is married and trying to stay on the straight and narrow, striving to live up to the image of a good-husband and good-father. Over the years, like many childhood friends, they have taken separate paths and the three had lost almost all of their childhood connections. When Jimmy's nineteen-year-old daughter is murdered, that changes.

In my opinion, this was a terrific book, definitely worthy of five stars. I absolutely loved how Dennis Lehane got inside his characters heads; he brought them to life like no other author that I know of can. Was it the best book I've ever read? No. It was good, however, it could have been better, it could have been, Child 44 better, if it weren't such a downer. I'm not saying that I need 500 pages of sunshine and lollipops, but the end of this book left me with the same depressing feeling as the beginning. The boys themselves hardly changed at all as grown men. That may have been the whole point the author is trying to make: Life is a perpetual cycle of, poverty, abuse, hate and anger, and for the fortunate ones a cycle of love, luck, and abundance mixed with abuse, hate etc. The author leaves you with very little hope that these cycles can be broken.

Chilling
This book kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. Lehane has a way of capturing his audience. The book is a perfect example of how abuse come full circle. Great read.

A Tale of Three Boys
An academy-award winning movie based upon a phenomenal book. Three 11-year old boys are confronted by two men in a car while playing ball in the street in 1975, Sean Devine, daredevil Jimmy Marcus, and quiet, tag-along, Dave Boyle. Thinking the men were the police, the one man instructed Dave to get into the car so he could take him home to the Flats (poor section of Boston). Dave did as he was told only to be locked in a cellar and become the victim of child molesters. Dave escapes, and the boys go their separate ways only to be brought together again, twenty five years later, as the result of the murder of Jimmy's 19 year old daughter, Katie. Dave's trauma, resonated upon Sean and Jimmy, changes the course of their lives. As they struggle to find the real killer, their boyhood issues surface to become consequences of their actions. Mystic River is a story not to be ignored.