DDC/MDS
813/.54 |
Publication
Original publication date
Description
Fiction. Literature. Mystery. Thriller. HTML: 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..… (more)
Status
Call number
Collection
User reviews
Of the three boys we are introduced to at the beginning, Sean Devine seems the most likely to succeed. None of the boys come from money, but Sean's family lives The Point, a slightly more affluent working-class neighborhood, and his parents place a premium on education and making sure that Sean has choices that they didn't have. Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle are from the other side of the tracks, a lower-rent district called The Flats. Jimmy is a reckless, fearless kid who thrives on breaking the rules. Dave is that kid who is nobody's friend and nobody's enemy. He tags along after Jimmy wherever he goes, and Jimmy tolerates him without actually seeking out his company. Then Dave is abducted, and when he returns four days later nothing is the same.
When we meet the boys again as grownups, their lives have not gone as we might have predicted. Sean has become a cop, and a good one, but his marriage is a shambles and he's just coming off a suspension. Jimmy has moved past an earlier life of crime and now is a law-abiding owner of a small convenience store with three daughters. Dave continues to drift through life, where even a wife and a son can't anchor him to reality and his childhood horror keeps bubbling to the surface in ways he can't predict or control. It all comes to a head when Jimmy's teenage daughter is murdered, Sean is assigned to investigate, and Dave quickly becomes a suspect. Lehane layers revelation upon revelation, slowly building the story to a climax that dispenses a rough sort of justice that ultimately nobody can take satisfaction in.
I knew Lehane was a fine writer well-versed in grim and twisty subjects. His Kenzie-Gennaro series is a masterful display of dark humor and gruesome tragedy. With Mystic River, he's created another pitch-perfect examination of the ways in which past and future combine to create an uncomfortable present. This book could be the textbook for a master class in how to convey a sense of place and character strictly through dialogue, which carries all the flavor of working-class Boston in every line. Even if you've seen the movie and you think you already know how it ends, you'll enjoy the scenery along the way.
This is essentially a plot-driven book that is better than most because of the author's overall abilities at characterization. Lehane seems to actually care about the working class people and communities he writes about here. He fairly consistently shows solid insight into
Despite these solid plusses, though--and my main reason for seeing the novel as primarily plot-driven--is Lehane's questionable sense of focus. There are just too many chapters that play the familiar "leave 'em hanging and do a chapter describing lunch" approach. Lehane often uses such filler chapters ostensibly to do characterization, but often the details seem pointless and indulgent. The chapters on the Harris mother, on the preparations for the funeral, describing Jimmy's interactions with his father-in-law, and so on, seem to serve little purpose except for delaying gratification.
More seriously, though, were two aspects of the novels characterization that seem WAAAY off.
First, we learn about 2/3 of the way through that Jimmy is supposed to be some sort of wunderkind in the crime world. I suppose Lehane saw this as a detail necessary to support Jimmy's grasp of who fingered him and got him sent to prison. But it just seems to come out of nowhere. There is honestly nothing in the guy's thoughts, mannerisms, and especially his demeanor as a child, that speaks to anything like the sort of mind we are told he has as the book winds down. We are simply TOLD that he is a genius.
Second, there is the laughably lame explanation for why young Ray killed Katie. "Y'know, it's these crazy kids today, with their videogames and absent souls." Right. The initial accidental shooting I can buy. But the very idea that they would chase her into the woods and then savagely beat her to death just...defies credulity. I had figured out whodunit far earlier than it was revealed, and it seemed to me that Lehane had a FAR more reasonable motive to use: young Ray could have somehow found out that Jimmy had killed Ray Sr., and then seen his brother's intent to elope with Katie as yet another knife into young Ray's heart. After all, his older brother was really the only human connection young Ray had left. But instead we get this children of the damned b.s.
This sounds like a lame crime
Dennis Lehane, you can write a novel, sir.
I decided to read the novel even though I saw the movie because I wasn't that impressed by the movie. It was a well-acted film, but I thought that the writing had some weak points. I know that turning a 400-page novel into a 2-hour screenplay means weeding out some story so I was interested in what was left out. Unfortunately, very little was cut. The weak points of the movie were the weak points of the book. It tried to be about the struggles each of the three lead characters had with their wives, their families, their jobs, their neighborhoods, their pasts, and themselves. That sounds too ambitious, and it was. The book ended up too wordy in some places and too shallow in others.
The only other detective novel I've read this year was Jonathan Letham's Motherless Brooklyn. I would highly recommend that book.
The story moves at a good pace. Lehane has chosen carefully when to reveal different facts and experiences. He does a nice job of hinting at some things until the time comes to reveal them. The story is well constructed and the style supports it. Lehane slips into hyperbolic "tough streets" type descriptions of minor characters, but these sins are minor.
The ending of the story is particularly effective. We see hints of what will happen to the characters, including conflict, but no certainty. Overall, the best book I've read so far this year.
This is a novel about grief, friendship, masculinity, growing older, loss, family, deindustrialisation and what can and cannot be escaped from the past. But it doesn’t shout about it. It is a serious book about people marketed to appeal to the thriller fan. And it is thrilling: I read its 500-odd pages in a few days; if I’d been on holiday it would have been over even sooner. When I was about half way through and anticipating my feelings at the end of the novel, I worked out who I would need to buy this book for: I came up with about six or seven people that would just have to read it.
In the end, it did not quite live up to its enormous promise. This might be true for men of any generation, but fathers are sentimentalised at the expense of sons. Older males are stoic, admirable and possibly alcoholic: they are Men. Younger ones are shiftless, without honour and probably mixed up in drugs. There may too be a problem with the pacing - the built-up emotional punch does not hit quite as hard as I expected; and though the whodunit aspect was never overly important, it is resolved almost casually, and slightly unconvincingly.
But it was never really about who committed the murder, it is about the effects and reverberations of that death upon a community. It is a powerful, wrenching novel, disguised as an airport thriller – I won’t be buying it for you, but do yourself a favour: get it for yourself.
paths cross again as adults when the daughter of one of them is murdered. The jacket blurb whets the appetite for a book that I devoured in huge bites. The
mystery is woven so skillfully that I didn't see the answer for a while,
once I did figure it out, the psychological twists kept me turning the pages
until the wee hours of the morning. The finale was shocking and sad, and
the ending of the book leave you hanging and imagining what will happen
next, even though in your gut you already know.
I'd give this one a 5. It's a good read.
I guess I'm a bit of a traditionalist & like my baddies to get their comeuppance at the end of the book; I want fiction in my fiction, not shades of real life.
That incident changed all three of their lives.
25 years later, Sean is a homicide detective with the Massachusetts State Police; he is married but his wife Lauren has left him. Jimmy, after having served 2 years in the penitentiary for robbery, now owns a grocery store. He is married to Annabeth, with 3 daughters; one of them Katie, is from his first marriage. Jimmy's wife and Katie's mother, Marita, died from cancer while Jimmy was in prison, and he clings to Katie as his only certainty after he was released from prison. Dqve, too, is married to Celeste with a boy, Michael. All live in East Buckingham, the neighborhood in which they grew up.
Then, one Saturday night, Katie goes out partying with her two best friends. She is planning to elope to Las Vegas the next day with Brendan Harris, a young man from the neighborhood for whom her father has no love and whom he has expressly forbidden her to date--never mind marry. So this is a going-away, bachelorette party, and the three young women get thoroughly drunk. They wind up at a sleazy bar, where Katie dances on the bar. Dave is there, along with others from the neighborhood, and Katie is warned to go home by a local Irish Mafia type. The three young women leave; Katie drops Eve and Diane off at Eve's place, and starts home.
She never makes it.
Dave Boyle returns home at 3 am, covered in blood, the result, he says, of a mugging where he totally lost control and did serious damage to the would-be mugger. He himself is sporting a knife cut on his abdomen. Although the story somehow doesn't fit together, Celeste assists him by washing his clothes of the blood and arranging to have them disposed.
The next day, Jimmy and Annabeth are getting ready for the First Communion of their daughter Nadine. Katie who was supposed to work an early shift at the store, never shows; Jimmy arranges for a cover. Annoyed far more than worried, he and Annabeth head for the church. Still no Katie--not early or late.
Meantime, the State Police have received a call that something serious may have occurred in Penitentiary Park--Pen park--an enclave within the city of Boston, but really under state jurisdiction. Sean and his new partner, Sgt. Whitey Powers, catch the call and go to the park. There they find a car with blood in it, but the victim appears to have escaped. Calling in extra search power, they track the victim deep into the park. There, beneath an old drive-in movie screen, they find Katy Marcus--brutally murdered.
Lehane spends one-fifth of the book setting up the tragedy and laying the groundwork for at pitiless looks at working class life as a character in this murder plot. The way he does it is to examine a neighborhood and the relationships within it--ties of both friendship and marriage that carry with them certain responsibilities and an unquestioning attitude towards life, which together constitutes an entire way of life. That way of life determines the destinies of the three boyhood friends and their families regardless of the different ways in which they have evolved and the differing positions they hold in life. Jimmy is clearly a leader, Sean a slight outsider because of class divisions within the neighborhood--he comes from a slightly better off background and has attended college--Dave because of what happened one Saturday 25 years before. It's almost a documentary.
Lehane's writing is superb, as is his "plotting". You never really feel you're reading a thriller, even though the tension climbs so high that it is almost impossible to put the book down. His climax is unnerving, and conclusion, in the form of a sort of epilogue, is chilling. In a certain sense, there is no resolution to the book; it is morally ambiguous. it is very unsettling.
Absolutely outstanding. Highly recommended.
A real page turner.
The mystery itself was not that spectacular. I pretty well knew who did what and how things would end. Lehane’s quality writing made it worthwhile to read on until the tragedy reached its inevitable conclusion. There are flickers of redemption at the end of the book, at least for a couple of the characters. Whether they are deserved is left up to the reader.