Mystic River audiobook

Mystic River, Dennis LehaneMystic River is a novel by Dennis Lehane that was published in 2001. The Mystic River is not only a psychological, terrifying, and stressful novel, but also an epic one, describing love, loyalty, camaraderie, faith, and family. The story of this book is about people whose past has invariably affected their future, and who find themselves in dark situations, which exposes them to their inner and hidden selves.The novel revolves around three boys who grow up as friends in Boston: Dave Boyle, Sean Devine, and Jimmy Marcus. When the story opens, we see Dave abducted by child molesters while he, Sean, and Jimmy are horsing around on a neighborhood street. Dave escapes and returns home days later, emotionally shattered by his experience. The book then moves forward 25 years: Sean has become a homicide detective, Jimmy is an ex-convict who currently owns a convenience store, and Dave is a shell of a man. Jimmy's daughter disappears and is found brutally murdered in a city park, and that same night, Dave comes home to his wife, covered in blood. Sean is assigned to investigate the murder, and the three childhood friends are caught up in each other's lives again.تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز دوازدهم ماه نوامبر سال2016میلادیعنوان: رودخانه میستیک؛ نویسنده: دنیس لیهان؛ مترجم نادر ریاحی؛ تهران موسسه فرهنگی - هنری جهان کتاب، سال‏‫‏‏‏‏‏1394؛ در560ص؛ شابک9786006732459؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده21مکتاب «رودخانه میستیک» نه تنها یک رمان روان‌شناسانه، هراس‌انگیز، و پرتنش، بلکه داستانی حماسی، در وصف عشق، وفاداری، رفاقت، ایمان و خانواده نیز هست؛ داستان این کتاب، درباره ی آدم‌هایی ست که بگذشته‌ ها، به گونه ی تغییرناپذیری، بر آینده‌ شان تأثیر گذاشته، و خود را در موقعیت‌های تاریکی پیدا میکنند، که آن‌ها را با خود درونی و پنهان‌شان، مواجه می‌سازدچکیده: (هنگامی که آن‌ها بچه بودند، «شان»، «جیمی» و «دِیو» با همدیگر دوست شدند؛ اما سپس ماشین غریبه‌ ای از راه رسید؛ یکی از بچه‌ ها سوار ماشین شد، و دو تای دیگر نشدند؛ و سپس رویداد دهشتناکی افتاد؛ رویدادی که به دوستی آن‌ها پایان داد، و آن سه پسر را، برای همیشه دیگر کرد؛ بیست و پنج سال پس از آن روز: «شان» یک کارآگاه پلیس است؛ «جیمی» یک زندانی پیشین است، که صاحب یک بقالی شده، و «دِیو» برای نگهداشت زندگی و دور نگاه داشتن هیولای درونش، دست و پا می‌زند؛ هیولایی که او را به کارهای دهشتناک وامی‌دارد؛ آنگاه که جسد دختر «جیمی» پیدا می‌شود، پژوهش «شان»، که مأمور رسیدگی به آن پرونده است، او را با «جیمی» سرشاخ می‌کند؛ کسی که پیشینه ی جنایی اش، او را به سوی انتقام، و اجرای شخصی عدالت سوق می‌دهد؛ و حالا این «دِیو» است، که در شب کشته شدن دختر «جیمی»، با لباس سراسر خون‌ آلود به خانه می‌رسد؛ و ...)؛ تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 16/02/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ 10/01/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

I bought a hardback copy of Mystic River when it first came out, and I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know who has the slightest interest in crime fiction ever since. Oddly enough, it’s been almost 20 years since I first read the book, and I’d never revisited it until now. I love it, but there’s just so much Lehane-style depression that a fella can take.In a working class Boston neighborhood during the mid-‘70s,three young boys encounter a couple of child molesters pretending to be cops. One of the kids, Dave Boyle, ends up being taken by them and endures several days of abuse before managing to escape. Twenty-five years later Dave still lives in the same old neighborhood with his wife and son. Jimmy Marcus didn’t get in the car with Dave. He went on to become the leader of a crew of thieves, but a stretch in prison and caring for his young daughter, Katie, set Jimmy straight. Now he runs a corner grocery store in the neighborhood. Sean Devine also avoided the pedophiles, and he’s grown up to be a homicide investigator for the state police while trying to cope with his crumbling marriage.When Jimmy’s daughter Katie is brutally murdered, it’s a shock to the neighborhood. As Sean investigates the crime Jimmy has to deal with his grief. Dave was one of the last people to see Katie alive when she was out at a bar with some girlfriends, and he had no reason to hurt her. Yet, his wife Celeste knows that he came home late that night covered in blood…A recurring theme that Lehane explores is the damage done by crime and violence, and that’s the thing that lingers over this book and makes it great. Jimmy is convinced that something in his own past was the reason Katie was killed even as he spent years trying to be ‘good’. Sean’s career as a policeman has made him misanthropic, thinking that the world is filled with stupid people killing each for stupid reasons, and it’s soured his personal life. Both of them are also haunted by how close they came to sharing Dave’s fate, and Dave himself refuses to talk about what happened to him even as many who know what happened consider him ‘damaged goods’.Lehane takes all of these factors and adds a few more like what gentrification was doing to their old neighborhood to create one of the ultimate character driven pieces of crime fiction. The ultimate resolution and what happens both because of Dave getting in that car as a young boy and Katie’s murder seem like tragedies that beget more tragedies in a long string of unintended consequences. Considering the ending and reading this now, nearly 20 years after it was first published, made me think that there could be another story by now. If Lehane went back now and told us what happened next, I’d want to read that book.

5★“Four in the morning, and she was more awake than she’d been in years. She was Christmas-morning-when-you’re-eight kind of awake. Her blood was caffeine. Your whole life, you wished for something like this. You told yourself you didn’t, but you did. To be involved in a drama.”The story isn’t about her, though, it’s about them, and she knows them. Jimmy, Sean, and Davey. The boys. They grew up together, from different parts of town. But at eleven, boys are rough and tumble, and who cares where you live? You all play in the street, and when a car comes along with a couple of big guys in it who say they’re cops, who are you to question them? One of you gets in when told to, while the other two back off.Davey Boyle went for the ride, and no, they weren’t cops. Davey escaped after four days of abuse (which is never described, only referred to), and is now a seemingly quiet, pleasant man with an uneventful life. He had a rough childhood in the Flats, but he’s doing okay. He was a baseball star in high school and is now married with a young son. Jimmy Marcus also grew up in the Flats, was a happy-go-lucky hoodlum who got a little rougher over the years. He is now an ex-con, running a corner store and determined to go straight. He’s a widower with a second wife who is the only daughter of the eleven kids in the well-named Savage family. “When they were kids, they had no individuality to the outside world. They were just the Savages, a brood, a pack, a collection of limbs and armpits and knees and tangled hair that seemed to move in a cloud of dust like the Tasmanian Devil. You saw the cloud coming your way, you stepped aside, hoped they’d find someone else to f*ck up before they reached you, or simply whirl on by, lost in the obsession of their own grimy psychoses.”The third boy, now a local cop (a real one), did not live in the Flats, but on the Point, the nicer part of town. Sean Devine is separated, unhappily, achingly so. He hasn’t kept in touch with Jimmy and Davey, but of course he knows Jimmy’s criminal record. All three are still haunted by the men and the car that took Davey away. Davey, of course, but Sean and Jimmy are as well. What would have happened if? Could we have stopped it? We watched them drive him away.The blurb gives the crux of the story, which I think is a bit of a spoiler, so I’ll just say that the writing is terrific, the people are real, and the tension and plot make it hard to put down. Some books do make me keep thinking ‘just one more chapter. . . ’ This is one. So I’ll just add a few quotes that gave me a good sense of the story and the characters. This shows Jimmy’s early ambivalence, choosing between friendship and what he thinks he can get away with. When they were kids, he picked up Sean’s baseball glove just as he walked out of Sean’s house, but held it so nobody could see it.“Jimmy took the glove and he felt bad about it. Sean would miss it. Jimmy took the glove and he felt good about it. Sean would miss it.”Sean came from the Point and could afford the loss. Jimmy came from the Flats and was entitled to fend for himself however he could.This is one of the men who stopped the boys in the road.“He looked like a cop—blond crew cut, red face, white shirt, black-and-gold nylon tie, the heft of his gut dropping over his belt buckle like a stack of pancakes. The other one looked sick.”This is another pair of brothers who live in the Flats.“The brothers grew up crammed and mangy and irate in a bedroom the size of a Japanese radio beside the el tracks that used to hover over the Flats, blotting out the sun, before they got torn down when Brendan was a kid.”Suspecting the worst, but not wanting to admit it, feels like this. You know. You just know.“You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes—beyond logic—and you were usually right if it was a type of truth that was the exact kind you didn’t want to face, weren’t sure you could. That’s what you tried to ignore, why you went to psychiatrists and spent too long in bars and numbed your brain in front of TV tubes—to hide from hard, ugly truths your soul recognized long before your mind caught up.”This is one of my favourite books. No question, I just know.

Just before picking this book up - my first Lehane (it won't be my last) - I came across a quote by him illuminating the working-class, blue-collar nature of noir: In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb. I love this quote. It slices right to the heart of who we are reading about, and even why we are reading about them. In Mystic River, Lehane is shooting from both barrels; he intuitively knows who he is writing about and where -- the gritty, depressed, working-class neighborhoods of South Boston and the largely white, blue-collar families who live there. These are residents bound to one another when not by blood, then by loyalties forged from childhood friendships and the kinship that comes from growing up in the same neighborhood. A shared history, a sense of community, no matter how co-dependent, damaging or predatory. Lehane's characters are so vivid and three-dimensional they sigh and bleed across the pages. But you won't love them. They are beyond flawed, and you could even argue beyond redemption. Lehane is not writing about beauty and love or hope and healing. Lehane is painting a portrait of despair and guilt. His characters are damaged goods in many ways, with painful histories that have consumed them with a slow-burning rage. The love Jimmy Marcus has for his eldest daughter Katie is primal, almost animalistic in its fierceness. When a savage beating and shooting violently rips her away from him, Jimmy vows to see her killer brought to justice, one way or another. Who could have killed Katie Marcus? Nineteen years old, sweet and non-threatening, a good friend, a loving sister, working part-time in her father's neighborhood corner store. When Jimmy's childhood friend Sean is brought in to lead the investigation, there are more questions than answers to be found. It doesn't take long however, before Sean and his senior partner Whitey begin looking hard at Dave Boyle - another childhood friend from the neighborhood with dark secrets of his own. The handling of the mystery here, the construction, the pacing, the clues and final reveal, it's all flawlessly done. My only regret reading this novel is that I had seen the film first. While already knowing who killed Katie did not diminish my enjoyment, I can only imagine the sheer thrill this book delivers at the moment of climax if you didn't know. I found the women in this story to be at least as interesting as the men, if not more so. (view spoiler)[While I could sympathize with Celeste's confusion and doubt about Dave, I questioned her motives for going to Jimmy with her suspicions. Why go to the father? Why not the police? What did she think was going to happen? She knew the rules of the neighborhood. Did she really imagine Jimmy would not act, unequivocally and ruthlessly? She signed Dave's death warrant the moment she decided to tell Jimmy what she thought she knew. She got her husband killed and unraveled her own life, perhaps even her own sanity, in one careless impulse. Jimmy's wife Annabeth is ruthless in her own way, thinking only of her own family and status in the neighborhood. Her acceptance of Jimmy's violence, her pride in it, is practically sociopathic. Her husband won't find the cure for cancer, but dammit, he looks after his own. He does what needs to be done, like a King that rules over his realm. Her support is icky but oh so very real. Her disdain of Celeste's weakness, and her betrayal of her husband, more revealing of character than any other act or a thousand words. (hide spoiler)]This is a story that starts with tragedy and ends tragically. It is immensely engrossing and immeasurably rewarding. I did not just love it, I lived it. A word on the audiobook:There is an abridged version available out there with a very poor reader. Avoid that one. I listened to the unabridged version and it is fantastic. The reader's voice is strong and he carries the Boston accent nicely without it overpowering the story.

Every adult human being has the chance to choose a personally favored path of life (considering it isn't predeterminated by illnesses, accidents etc.), but the general direction this path heads towards will usually already be marked during childhood: This might be the idea which provoked Dennis Lehane to write about the abysms of humanity and the fateful consequences one single deed might release to weigh heavily upon your conscience for the rest of your life - even if it is something as simple as not entering a certain car while you are a kid.Lehane might be more well-known because of the successful movie adaption with Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley of his 2003 thriller Shutter Island, but when it comes to exploring human minds in their deepest psychological profundities, Mystic River is where the author truly shines. This novel (which has also been adapted into a movie starring Tim Robbins, Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon) focuses on three young childhood friends - Sean, Jimmy and Dave - whose friendship was changed forever when one of the boys was pulled into a strange car and had to go through something which could not be worse as an incisive childhood experience. About twenty years later, they have all grown into men with their own more or less intact families (although you might as well scratch the "more or" part). The story gets going when one of the friend's daughters is brutally murdered, another one of them starts to investigate the case as a police detective and the third friend soon turns into one of the suspects himself - with very strong evidence pointing towards him.This is no easy thriller to get through; with his elaborate descriptions of a Boston crime scene and the complex plot twists and dynamics between the relationships, Lehane keeps the intellectual niveau on a high level throughout the entire course of the novel as he explores failing marriages, bursting families and shocking revelations. As he did with "Shutter Island", he once again managed to challenge my personal perception of what human minds can be capable of. It might be fiction, but the author managed to write it in such a convincing way as if it was a nightmare come true.Dennis Lehane refrains from fast pace and instead relies on extensively detailed descriptions, painting a vivid picture filled with a dark atmosphere. This made it sometimes easy to put the book down again, yet all the time the book included enough potential to prompt the reader to return to reading. You may call the novel a classic 'whodunnit' tale, but it's more than that - so much more. The mystery/thriller genre is a very difficult one for an author to emerge out of the masses of authors who claim to glue their readers' eyes to their books, and yet many readers keep returning to this genre out of the hope to hold a true masterpiece in their hands one day. Mystic River might not be a masterpiece, but it's still everything you can possibly look for as a reader of crime fiction.It wasn't my first Lehane novel, and it definitely won't be my last either.

"I'm just saying there are threads, okay? Threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected."Mystic River is a great mystery, but it is so much more than that. It is a compelling plot-driven story with such well-written and fleshed out characters that it is pretty much just as equally a character-driven story. It is about consequences, family, friendship, and loyalty. Lehane's writing game is strong. Not a spoiler because the synopsis tells you that Jimmy's daughter is murdered, but when Jimmy finds out about his daughter, his reaction is so visceral, I could feel it and my heart broke for him.I had already seen the movie years ago which was also fantastic, but I wish I would have read the book first. I was absorbed in this gripping story from start to finish and highly recommend it. 5 stars.

“Jimmy knelt down by the river and plunged his hands in it, oily and polluted. . . We bury our sins here. We wash them clean.” I have now within a month listened to what I have heard from Goodreads friends are the three best novels from Dennis Lehane, Since We Fell, Shutter Island, and Mystic River. At this point, I have seen two film adaptations of his books that I liked very much, Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone. I haven’t read any of his other books (yet), but this one, based on a quick look at the range of them, is pretty much a masterpiece. I thought it was a great movie, seen more than a decade ago, but it is also a very great book, with real depth and passion, a story of tragic loss. Yes, it's a thriller, a mystery, but sometimes works rise above their genres, of course, to be great literature. Shutter Island is very good, a kind of homage to forties noir films; Since We Fell deals with upper-middle-class yuppie types, and both are well-written page-turners. But Mystic River would seem to be Lehane’s real territory, focused as it is on working-class folks from the East Buckingham neighborhood of Boston that Lehane clearly knows very, very well. In the other two books there is nothing approaching the depth of character and knowledge that he lovingly devotes to this Irish Catholic neighborhood, nothing like the compassion he has for each and every one of these people. I might talk in a lightly spoiler-ish way about some of the early parts of the book—not the ending, promise—because I figure thousands of you have read this or seen it by now. The novel revolves around three boys who grow up as friends, Dave Boyle, Sean Devine, and Jimmy Marcus. When the story opens, we see Dave abducted by two child molesters posing as cops, while he, Sean, and Jimmy are horsing around on a neighborhood street. Fast forward 25 years and Sean is a depressed cop with marital issues, Jimmy is a an ex-con on a second marriage, and Dave is pretty much an empty shell of a guy, trying to keep his marriage together and the demons at bay. When Jimmy's daughter is murdered, Sean is assigned to the case. His investigation has him confront Jimmy, who wants to take the law into his own hands: Hey, it’s my daughter! And then there is Dave, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered in someone else's blood. We think we know a lot at this point, but we are going to have unravel a lot of history before we are through (more than 400 pages, but it actually reads quickly, as it is so well-written and what happens is engaging), some of the stories entertwined.“I'm just saying there are threads, okay? Threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.”This is largely a man’s story, with loyalty and friendship central: “At that moment, Dave would have lifted a house for Jimmy, held it up to his chest until Jimmy told him where to put it down” but women—strong, tough, loyal—also play very central roles who say things such :“Life isn't happily ever after. . . It's work.” “She was his wife, mother, best friend, sister, lover, and priest.”Decisions women make are central to what happens. The healing love of family—the love of children—is an important part of this community and this novel. But is it enough to make up for the past?Mystic River is a majestic but also intensely character-driven thriller that explores how a group of friends in a community can survive who are fiercely loyal, yet hampered by ignorance, lies, self-deception, betrayal and loss. “What did we line up for? Where did we expect to go? And why were we never as happy as we thought we'd be once we got there?”There’s an image, near the end, of a parade, in the midst of much anguish and turmoil, and a funeral:“It was a beautiful day. A great day for a parade.” The parade functions just as a block party at the beginning of the book had served as a similar ritual moment of healing when Dave Boyle had come home from his nightmare abduction. Or is it a ritual that masks the truth, that hides real feelings? The parade follows a funeral, another moment of a communal moment of healing, we can only hope. Hours in a bar with family and friends, that’s another kind of healing ritual here. But as with the love of family and friends, is any social ritual enough to make up for the weight of the past?I loved this book and immediately re-ordered the film to see again.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story from start to finish. Dennis Lehane did a great job of creating a suspenseful story centered around a dark atmosphere. The story was a suspense, crime, and mystery novel that was multilayered with haunting psychological ambiance. There were multiple lines crossed that included childhood friends and the associated loyalty that can linger as we become adults, loyalty to immediate family and friends as adults, alignment of one's personal code of values & beliefs, faith, vengeance, and grieving with the pain of loss. Another unique aspect I enjoyed was the presentation of the characters, their flaws, and the dialogue and interweaving inner monologue that pushed the story along. The neighborhood and physical setting also acted as heavy influence to the story: a blue-collar, Irish-American, middle-to-low income Boston suburb often portrayed as raw, unforgiving, and hard-knock. I definitely got vibes of movies like The Departed, The Fighter, The Town in terms of a gritty visual. I plan to watch the movie on Netflix this weekend. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys a well-written and moving suspense novel. Thanks!

I read this masterpiece a while ago before I joined Goodreads and I've been contemplating posting a review because it's on the top of my favorites list. But for a while I wasn't sure I could say anything that could do justice to this remarkable book. Not only is it Dennis Lehane's greatest book (and that's saying a lot), this modern tragedy sets the standard for all contemporary crime dramas and thrillers. It's one of the only books that I would consider near perfect and I would recommend it to anyone. It's the novel that stuck with me the longest after reading it, and if I was forced to name a top favorite book, this would probably be it. This gush of praise might not be much of a review...but hey, just go read it.

Rating: 5.0/5.0Genre:Mystery + ThrillerSynopsis:Three boys who are friends having a fight. A strange car pulls right there. One of the boys gets into the car, the two others don’t. Something bad happens that changes the three boys forever. After 25 years from this incident, a murder happens that connects all the three now men together. What happens next does not bring anything other than misery and sorrow.Book Structure:The book consists of four parts and 26 chapters over 401 pages. The story is told from a third person’s perspective. My Thoughts:I have watched the movie adaptation which is directed by Clint Eastwood when it was released many years ago. I loved the movie very much. The story and the performances are extremely good. The movie was nominated for many Academy Awards including best picture and won the best actor and best supporting actor awards. It was time for me to read the book which I had on my shelf for some time.“Happiness comes in moments, & then it's gone until the next time. Could be years. But sadness settles it.”I went into this book knowing the story and having an idea about the thriller side of it. One would think this might affect my enjoyment of the story because this is a thriller and depends a lot on the mystery and the twists, but honestly, that did not happen. The writing style of Dennis Lehane totally hooked me. The characters are so well written. There are many layers of the characters that I don’t remember being present in the movie that the story was focusing on. I will have to rewatch the film again to make a more comprehensive comparison. All the main characters here are unforgettable, Jimmy, Dave, Sean, Annabeth, and Celeste. You will not have any favorites though because they are all flawed. You will question every single one of them for things they did or will do.“There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.” The story moves fast, there was no slightest feel of boredom that I felt while reading. There were times that I felt some heartache with these characters because of the pain they were going through. Dennis Lehane has shown us in this book several clear contrasts like how two different wives reacted differently to the crimes committed by their husbands. Both Celeste & Annabeth were wives yet their reactions were very different. There is a point that Annabeth criticizes Celeste by questioning what kind of a wife she is!I can’t recommend enough this book. It is a 5.0 star book for me. Read it and watch the movie adaptation. Both are excellent. “There is no street with mute stones and no house without echoes. —Góngora”

I’m picky with thrillers: I like them ambiguous, complicated and thought-provoking. It’s not enough to keep me on the edge of my couch cushion, turning the pages frantically; I want to feel the world and the characters’ reality as I work towards the dénouement. Everyone seems to love “Mystic River”, and I avoided it for a while because it is labeled as a thriller, and I was afraid it would be too ham-fisted for me. But I found a used copy at a thrift store and figured I didn’t have much to lose for a dollar…Well, apologies, Mr. Lehane: you are not a thriller writer, you are a literature author. I’m sorry I misjudged you.This book is not cheap and fast entertainment: it’s a hard story about people life gave a good beating to, and who are trying to carry on as best as they can despite all the damage that weighs on them. In its weird, dark way, it’s actually incredibly compassionate, which I hadn’t really expected. Lehane understands that we carry our parents and our childhoods along with us all the time, and he integrated that into his character development flawlessly. It is also an interesting portrait of the way some trauma keeps on rippling through our lives and makes us see and interpret things very differently than we would have if we didn’t have these ripples coursing through us constantly.Sean, Jimmy and Dave grow up in the 70’s, in a working-class area of Boston. Sean is the thoughtful kind, but he is nevertheless attracted to Jimmy’s wild and unpredictable personality, as where Dave is mostly along for the ride, happy to bask in the glow of his friendship with Jimmy. One day, as they are rough-housing in the street, two men dressed as plainclothes policemen drive by, stop the fight and make Dave get in the backseat, to take him home and tell his mother he’s been fighting. Dave makes his way back to his mother four days later, irreparably changed by this horrible event. But life will never really be the same for Sean and Jimmy neither, as all three of them will be haunted by that fate-defining moment, when one boy got in a stranger’s car and two boys didn’t.Forward twenty five years later: Sean is a police detective nursing the wounds of a broken marriage, Jimmy is a reformed crook who now owns a corner store and does his best to be a family man, while Dave hops from job to job, trying to keep his marriage together and his past buried. They haven’t really been in touch: Jimmy and Dave’s wives are cousins but not close friends, and Sean moved to a different part of Boston. But they are brought back together when tragedy strikes again: Jimmy’s 19 year-old daughter Katie is brutally murdered on the night she was planning to run away to Vegas with her boyfriend.Jimmy’s reaction to his daughter’s death is feral: his grief festers into rage in the blink of an eye, and the instincts honed during his criminal years rear their ugly heads. What he goes through has the heartbreaking intensity of a Greek play or Russian tragedy: family, death, madness, revenge and guilt all mixed together in a horrible, de-humanizing cocktail.The red herring – that may or may not be one, is also perfectly played because it will make the uninformed reader flip-flop between what he thinks happened a few times before the truth comes out. And the conclusion is as somber as it is satisfying.I had seen the movie over ten years ago, so I vaguely remembered some parts of the plot, but not enough to ruin the book, because Denis Lehane can write! He is obviously no stranger to the gritty reality of poor blue-collar families from South Boston, and he uses it to noir perfection to communicate the despair and anger of his characters. The way he describes people whose suffering has hardened them to the point where they simply cannot empathize anymore is chilling.An incredible book that shouldn’t be judged by where it’s shelved at the store: a dark and excellent novel.

If one approaches “Mystic River” with the same mindset that one would approach a conventional “thriller”, one is apt to be a tad disappointed. Because what Dennis Lehane does here is to masterfully use the structure of the genre to explore deep psychological and moral issues.Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle are kids playing and growing up together in the small town of East Buckingham in the US. Sean, being from the blue collar neighbourhood of the Point, is socially a cut above Jimmy and Dave who live in the “Flats” – Dave is even more underprivileged because he does not have a father and his mother is a bit crazy. But as children, such differences do not affect them – until one day, Dave is kidnapped by child molesters right from in front of their eyes. He returns, scarred by his experience, and is further traumatised by the social stigma he faces. It also ends the friendship between the three kids, and they move their different ways.However, they meet twenty-five years down the line. Now Jimmy is an ex-convict with a wife and three daughters. Dave is a one-time baseball hero with a wife and son, but who is still battling his ghosts. And Sean is a policeman whose wife has just left him. The reason for their meeting? Jimmy’s daughter Katie is murdered, Sean is assigned to the case, and Dave is one of the suspects – because he came back home, covered in somebody else’s blood, the night Katie died.As events proceed to their tragic conclusion, the three former friends realise that they can never outrun their karma.***Have you ever wondered how much randomness affects our lives? For example, if Hitler had become successful as a painter, he probably would have never created the Nazi party. If Gandhi had not been chucked out from the first class compartment in South Africa, he may not have joined the freedom movement. If some random bit of mould had not dropped into Alexander Fleming’s bacterial cultures, we probably would not have discovered penicillin.Similarly, one random event in three boys’ life spreads its tentacles far down the line so as to twist their lives beyond recognition. Even though cause and effect is explicit only in the case of Dave, the author gives the impression that the lives of Sean and Jimmy as well have been impacted by that cursed afternoon; maybe even Jimmy’s life of crime (the karma of which came back, according to him) also had a start that day? As well as Sean’s failure to connect with his wife and the collapse of his marriage?The karma in this tale is random – it does not have the focussed energy of “just desserts” usually found in such literature. Karma here is a loose cannon, running berserk, letting go at random intervals; those in the line of fire get it. This is the collective karma of a people who have created a society where wolves in human clothing like those who took Dave can grow. A karma which is much, much more brutal than the people whom it affects.For ultimately, this novel, I felt, is an indictment of America; a “mystic river” whose cavernous depths are populated with corpses of age-old sins: sins which are submerged but unforgotten.Because old sins have long shadows.

Writing this review as I sit here watching Sean Penn discover the brutal death of his daughter, kicking myself once again because this is another book I should of read a long time ago. Just glad in a way that I also hadn't seen the film and blown a powerfully compelling ending that managed to stay just out of my grasp until two pages before the big reveal. Mystic River is a riveting character driven crime thriller about three boys, one abducted and forever scarred with what he endured, all grown up but with distinctly different futures. Shaped by circumstance, three very different characters, surviving life with wildly opposing ideals but nonetheless each one totally gripping. Jimmy Marcus's daughter goes out one night and never makes it home, tragically killed, devastation closely follows and the hunt for a killer that cleverly shifts focus leaving deep consequences in its wake."I know in my soul I contributed to my child’s death. I can feel it. But I don’t know how." Sean Devine, now a detective and hauled back to his old neighbourhood to investigate the murder, old friends, old memories and lies occupy his thoughts, the truth just out of reach.'Sean felt a sudden lurch in the morning, a shifting in the softness of it.' And Dave Boyle, abducted as a child, both an intense sadness and madness, never far away, following him round hand in hand with a wretched betrayal.'And he’d grown up into this tall, smart, handsome guy with a voice you could listen to all night and eyes that seemed to peel you away in layers.' Top marks for an absolutely gripping plot, powerful and compelling characters, and delightful prose. One of the best, simple as. I don’t normally swear in my reviews but this deserves a fucking big round of applause and I’ll be visiting Mr Lehane’s back catalogue very soon and the film is nowhere near as good as the read IMHO.Also posted at http://paulnelson.booklikes.com/post/...

I'm not sure why it took me so long to read this book, but now that I have, I want to see the film adaptation, too! It's an intense story from start to finish, told from different POVs, which worked really well to create suspense. This method also allowed Lehane to make each of the characters seem very fleshed out and real. You could feel Jimmy's anguish and Dave's confusion, and this made an almost exhausting read, because I got so sucked into the emotions of the characters. The story itself isn't the most original, but the way it is told makes it outstanding. The writing is taut and polished and the setting drawn out so well I felt I was walking those streets beside the characters. I already know I'll be thinking about this book for some time to come. Definitely recommended!