Mystic River - Softcover

Lehane, Dennis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553818244 ISBN 13: 9780553818246

Publisher: Bantam, 2006

Synopsis

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up their street. One boy got in 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 Devine is a homicide detective. Jimmy Marcus is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave Boyle is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay -demons that urge him to do horrific things.

When Jimmy Marcus' daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine is assigned to the case. His personal life unravelling, he must go back into a world he thought he'd left behind to confront not only the violence of the present but the nightmares of his past. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy Marcus, who finds his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave Boyle, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered in someone else's blood...

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: Bantam
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0553818244
• ISBN 13: 9780553818246
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528