Mystic River - Softcover

Lehane, Dennis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060584750 ISBN 13: 9780060584757

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 2003

Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling novel from Dennis Lehane is a gripping, unnerving psychological thriller about the effects of a savage killing on three former friends in a tightly knit, blue-collar Boston neighborhood.

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.

About this title

Review:

Dennis Lehane's Mystic River takes the material of the ordinary police procedural thriller and shapes it into heart-break. As boys, Jimmy, Dave and Sean were friends, until one day Dave was abducted by two men pretending to be cops, and was never quite the same again. As men, Dave is a damaged fantasist, safe in a quietly happy marriage; Jimmy a retired criminal making a good respectable living for the sake of his children; and Sean is the homicide cop who finds himself investigating the murder of Jimmy's eldest daughter Katie. This is not just a book about what becomes of the children who grow into adults; it is about what happens to a neighbourhood when the rules change, when an old established working-class district acquires gentrified espresso bars at one end and the beats of the city's most dangerous whores at the other. It is also a book about the tragedy of all sudden violent deaths; we never forget our sense of Katie as she was, dancing on the last night of her life--she is never just the corpse here, never just the object of mourning and investigation. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

"Get Dennis Lehane's Mystic River. Boy, does he know how to write" (Elmore Leonard)

"Enormously impressive: page-turning but thoughtful; moving in its sad inevitability... One of the finest novels I've read in ages" (Peter Guttridge Observer)

"Heart-scorching... penetrating... a powerhouse of a novel" (The New York Times Book Review)

"One of the greats of crime writing" (Guardian)

"Lehane's best book by far. Like all his writing, it shimmers with great dialogue and a complex view of the world" (Newsweek)

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0060584750
• ISBN 13: 9780060584757
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416