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- Hardcover: 416 pages ;
Dimensions (in inches): 1.30 x 9.57 x 6.48
- Publisher: William Morrow;
(January 30, 2001)
- ISBN: 0688163165
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Book
Description
"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 tip 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 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 terrible things.
When Jimmy Marcus's daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine
is assigned to the case. His personal life unraveling, 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 that 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 with someone
else's blood.
While Sean Devine attempts to use the law to return peace and
order to the neighborhood, Jimmy Marcus finds his need for
vengeance pushing him ever closer to a moral abyss from which
lie wont be able to return, and Dave's wife, Celeste, sleeps at
night with a man she fears may very well be a monster. a monster
who fathered her child and hides his true nature from everyone,
possibly even himself.
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.
Newsweek
"Stylish...Mystic River is Lehane's
best book...it shimmers with great dialogue and a complex view
of the world."
Boston
Magazine
"Dennis Lehane might be the best
mystery writer we have in this country today."
The New
York Times Book RevieW
"A powerhouse of a...novel...
heart-scorching... penetrating..."
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
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