Misterele fluviului

by Dennis Lehane, Ligia Caranfil (Translator)

Când erau copii și creșteau împreună într-o parte rău-famată din Boston, Jimmy Markum, Dave Boyle și Sean Devine își petreceau timpul bătând mingea pe stradă, așa cum făceau cei mai mulți băieți în cartierul lor din East Buckingham. Nu se întâmplă niciodată ceva extraordinar în cartierul lor. Adică, până în momentul în care Dave a trecut printr-o întâmplare ce avea să le schimbe viețile pentru totdeauna.

Douăzeci și cinci de ani mai târziu, cei trei se regăsesc la un alt eveniment dramatic din viața lor: uciderea fiicei de 19 ani a lui Jimmy. Fiind acum polițist, Sean primește cazul, iar el și partenerul său trebuie să rezolve crima aparent lipsită de motiv. Ei trebuie de asemenea să fie cu un pas înaintea lui Jimmy care este răvășit de furie și vrea să îl găsească pe criminalul fiicei sale.

Având legătură cu crima printr-o serie de circumstanțe, Dave este nevoit să se confrunte cu demonii propriului trecut. Demoni care amenință să îi distrugă căsătoria și orice speranță ar avea pentru viitor. Pe măsură ce investigația se concentrează asupra celor trei prieteni, are loc o poveste de rău-augur ce se referă la conceptele de prietenie, familie și inocență pierdută prea repede.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Thriller, Crime, Mystery Thriller, Suspense, Book Club

526 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Dennis Lehane (born Aug 4th, 1966) is an American author. He has written several novels, including the New York Times bestseller Mystic River, which was later made into an Academy Award winning film, also called Mystic River, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon (Lehane can be briefly seen waving from a car in the parade scene at the end of the film). The novel was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and won the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction, and France's Prix Mystere de la Critique.

Reviews

[Adina ( back from Vacay…slowly recovering) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to start the year with a 5* rating and I am so happy to share this amazing dark novel with you. It is masterpiece as a mystery novel but also as pure literature. I’ve wanted to read Lehane since I’ve seen the amazing movie with Leo di Caprio, called Shutter Island. It is made after the book with the same name and I was sure that I would love the author’s writing, if the book was anything like the movie. I finally chose to start with his other most popular novel, which also got two movies, Mystic River,

Three young boys, Jimmy, Dave and Sean, are playing on the streets. Two men who pretend to be cops take Dave away in their car. The others do not get in the car. The kid escapes four days later but he is no longer himself. Years after that event, Jimmy’s daughter is killed and in in the same night Dave comes home with someone else’s blood on his shirt. Sean is now a cop and is the person investigating the crime. The three former friends meet again but in totally different circumstances.
Yes, at first glance it is a very well-crafted murder mystery but it is so much more. It is a novel about life in the poor neighborhoods of Boston, about trauma, about love, lost, redemption and rage. The writing was really exquisite and the author was an excellent creator of characters, especially damaged ones. All the characters in this novel were complex, had real thoughts, aspirations and hurts. I could really feel what they were feeling and was able to understand them and their actions. One scene where Jimmy mourns his daughter will remain forever in my heart as one of the most harrowing and true passages about loss.

Mystic river is dark, suspenseful and yes, sometimes depressing but also tender and compassionate. It deserves all the prizes it got and more.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once upon a time, three boys were fighting in the street when two men claiming to be plainclothes cops show up. One kid gets in the car, the others stay put, and their lives will never be the same. Decades later, Dave Boyle, the kid who got into the car, is accused of killing the daughter of Jimmy Marcus, one of the other boys, and the third boy has grown up to be Sean Devine, the cop in charge of the case. Did Boyle do it? And if he didn't, can Sean find the real killer?

Yeah, 2013 was supposed to be the year of Dennis Lehane for me. It probably would have been had I not discovered George Pelecanos. However, I'm back aboard the Lehane Train now and quite pleased.

While Mystic River is normally classified as a thriller, it's so much more than that, an exploration of growing up and what a traumatic childhood event can blossom into. Mystic River is the tale of three Boston boys who grew up to be very different Boston men. Dave Boyle has drifted from job to job, never quite managing to bury his abduction experience. Jimmy Marcus is a former career criminal who has gone straight and become a family man. And Sean Devine is a cop with a wife he hasn't seen in over a year and a child he's not sure is his.

From the beginning, Lehane kept the waters sufficiently muddy to hold my interest. While I knew I was supposed to assume Dave Boyle killed Katie Marcus, Lehane had me changing my opinion quite a few times. None of the three leads are very simple characters. Dave's got his childhood baggage but still tries to be the best husband and father he can be. Jimmy was once a criminal and is still a hard man but is a loving family man. Sean is a supercop but his marriage is in ruins and he's coming off a suspension for something very petty.

Once Sean is on the case, the book becomes very hard to put down, like it's been duct-taped to your hands. The mystery, unlike a lot of them these days, is solvable and I guessed who the killer was about 75% of the way through, even though I got the motive wrong.

The writing is everything I came to expect from the Kenzie and Gennaro series and then some. I think this is the book where Dennis Lehane went from "Good Thriller Writer" to simply "Great Writer."

Five stars. I suppose I'll track down the movie now.

[Em Lost In Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intense, stunning, and shocking.

And I always wanted to know what was going on in Jimmy's head after the last stunt that he pulled. Movies would never tell us that, and that's why books are always better...

[Kemper · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Colin Baldwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

After Sean Penn won the Oscar for best actor, Tim Robbins for best actor in a supporting role and Clint Eastwood was nominated for best director, plus many more nominations for those involved in the filming, I knew I needed to watch this movie. And I eventually did, quite a few years ago. It was great.

After that, I knew I would eventually read the novel. And I have. It is great.

Hats off to Dennis Lehane, an author who can dodge and weave around his storyline, giving us his complex characters bit by bit, flaw by flaw, strength by strength, and soul by soul.

Impressive.

[Trudi · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. 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.

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.

[PattyMacDotComma · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Fabian {Councillor} · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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.

[Brett C · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dave was abducted by some pedophiles as a kid. Jimmy and Sean were lucky not facing the same fate. Now Katie, Jimmy's daughter is murdered. Who did it and why? See the former friends come together again. Are they still friends? There is a shadow hanging over each character... the author did an outright brilliant job describing his characters and moving the plot slowly forward like the mystic river he is referring to in his book. You're drawn into this neighborhood and look forward what really happened here. A modern classic among murder mysteries. Top pick and highly recommended!

[Constantine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating: 5.0/5.0

Genre:
Mystery + Thriller

Synopsis:
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”

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Kelly (and the Book Boar) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

“We bury our sins here. We wash them clean.”

Mystic River was another selection of mine for the (already completed) Read to Reel challenge at my local library. Although I’ve owned this book for years, for whatever reason it remained on the “hysterectomy shelves” untouched until the librarian forced my hand. Amazingly, I have also been able to avoid ever seeing the movie that was released 10+ years ago due to my dislike for Clint Eastwood’s directing . . . . .



Ahhhhh save it, Clint!

The story here is about Sean, Jimmy and Dave. Twenty-five years ago they were rough-housing in the street when two men claiming to be cops pulled up in an unmarked police cruiser. Sean and Jimmy went home, Dave got in the car with the men and managed to find his way back four days later . . . .



Fast-forward to the present where Sean is a detective with a wife (and possible daughter) who have split on him, Jimmy is an ex-con turned family man who owns and operates the corner store and Dave is someone who presents a good front, but whose past torments him more than anyone could ever imagine. When Jimmy’s daughter is brutally murdered in a local park the three former friends find their lives intertwined once again and all the demons buried so long ago come boiling to the surface.

Like all of the other Dennis Lehane’s I’ve read, this one was a real wicked pissa. If you ever need an excuse for putting your head in the oven, Lehane is an author who will deliver them in spades. Mystic River is categorized as a “Mystery/Thriller” like all of the author’s other works, but that sells this novel so short. While there is most assuredly a mystery to solve, I believe most readers will find that aspect of the book takes second fiddle to the character study of these three families. It’s quite easy to see the red herring and, for people who gravitate toward the thriller or crime genres, it’s pretty simple to see the end well before you ever reach it. And if your brain works like mine and 100% refuses to acknowledge the casting decisions made by the pros, but instead replaces them with . . . .



A story like Mystic River can only end one way.

If you like ‘em dark, look no further. Lehane is a master of this art and proves once again that . . . .

“I think anyone’s capable of anything.”

All the stars.

(And if you want to continue on a downward spiral of superbads happening that eff up kids’ lives forever, look no further than sleepers.)

Book # I lost count in the Library Winter Reading Challenge

[Ginger · Rating 5 out of 5]

After finishing this Sunday night, I realized Mystic River is a novel that stays with you for hours, days and months later.

While walking around the park that evening, I was thinking about the overall journey that each character goes through in this book. I was gripped with my thoughts and trying to understand the life decisions that Sean, Dave and Jimmy go through.

✔️ Was his life always going to be tragic?
✔️ Did he always know how to sort and understand others’ intentions?
✔️ Was he always going to be this type of man regardless of life challenges and tragedy?
✔️ Did this one moment in time physically, mentally and emotionally change each character in a completely different trajectory than what they could have been?

Mystic River was more than a murder mystery. It’s a look into human suffering, motivations and evil that can reside buried in someone for years.
And if those circumstances are just right, that evil gets mixed together, left to simmer and just explodes one day.

Dennis Lehane wrote a masterpiece. At least to me he did.

When you pick up a book, this is what reading is supposed to be like. It's a complete immersion of pacing, plot, and atmosphere that clings to the mind days after you've closed it.

[Margitte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three young boys. Three young lives. A car with two scoundrels in the road. Silence.

Many years later, a murder of someone's daughter. Life had a story to tell. Friendship broke out in different voices.

I'm not going to say much about this book. An excellent, gritty, somber, literary, psycho-thriller. The murder mystery denied me more sleep! I wanted to cry for all of them. Still do.

To Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle: - I can never forget, or give up on you. Friendship does not work that way. Sad that the ending of the book interrupted our story.

This should have been a buddie-read. Oy! I need someone to discuss the ending with. Unusual, unique, thought-provoking.

You do not read this book to escape reality. In fact, you're thrown right into it with no way out, or Plan B, in sight. A slice of life dished out in no uncertain terms.

He couldn't remember much of the specifics— just a few details, unconnected—and he had a sense that there hadn't been much of a narrative flow in the first place. Still, the raw texture of it had sunk like razor points into the back of his skull, left him feeling skittish all morning.

Mark my words, this quote is prophetic. :-)

[Paul E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely well written. This author can do more for character development in one or two pages than others try in 30. There was not one moment of let down or disbelief. This is a very good, gritty, tough and tragic mystery. Has to be on a top 10 (of all time) list somewhere. ;-)

[Paul Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

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/...

[Merry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book has been out for 20 years so am just writing my thoughts. I give it a 3.5 and round to 4. I listened to the audio version and thought it well done. The narrator's tone for different characters was subtle and this took some getting use to. I figured out half way through the book who did it. The story moved along well and only occasionally went into a bit too much detail. I had not seen the movie so all was fresh and new to me. The book is not that dated even though it was written years ago. A few terms and references are not used any longer.
My problem was at the end of the book I didn't like anyone even though I gave it 4 stars. I was left with a feeling that a form of justice was done but I would not read it again.

[Nandakishore Mridula · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Malia · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Sergio Ferenczy · Rating 5 out of 5]

¡Chapeau! Me quito el sombrero ante Lehane, Mystic River es una novela brillante.

Del autor previamente había leído 'Golpe de Gracia' hace apenas un mes y fue amor a primera vista, novela que disfruté mucho. El cuerpo me pedía leer más de él y que mejor que una de sus novelas más famosas. La película la vi hace tantos años que apenas recordaba nada, me he podido sumergir en sus páginas con la mente totalmente en blanco.
Obviamente no puedo hablar mucho de la obra de Lehane habiendo leído solo dos novelas, pero al menos estas dos tienen mucho paralelismos, la premisa es muy similar. Podría decir: Lehane se repite, pero no, lo que quiero es más de esto.

Estamos en los barrios humildes de Boston, tres niños, Jimmy, Sean y Dave están jugando en la calle cuando se les acerca un coche. Ese día, ese momento, marcará el resto de sus vidas. Años después, ya adultos, otro acontecimiento los vuelve a juntar.

El argumento de la novela en sí es algo que podemos encontrar en infinidad de otras del género; un asesinato y la posterior búsqueda del asesino. Pero Lehane nos lleva mucho más allá que la simple investigación. Aquí es todo mucho más complejo, todos los personajes son magistrales, tanto los principales como los secundarios. Sentimos su soledad, su culpa, las mierdas que llevan años arrastrando y también al amor hacia los suyos.

El autor se toma su tiempo en presentarte a los personajes con un ritmo pausado, personalmente no tengo problema con esto, si me resulta interesante y conecto con el estilo narrativo, que así es en este caso, me da igual el número de páginas que sean, ya habrá tiempo de llegar a la chicha. Hay autores con los que te sientes cómodo y a gusto que da igual lo que te estén contando, te sumerges y ya no sales.
En cierto momento la novela coge más ritmo, como lector te pones más tenso y de ahí ya cuesta abajo y sin control hasta el final. Mientras escribo esto solo pienso: Joder, si con decir que es un novelón me ahorro toda la parrafada.

La ambientación es muy oscura, todo está envuelto es familias desestructuradas, brotes de violencia, alcoholismo y un largo etcétera Lehane reflexiona sobre este tema cuando todo esto lo vives en la infancia, las probabilidades de que te dejen secuelas son muy altas.

Poco más que añadir sobre está obra maestra ya archiconocida. 5⭐ bien merecidas. Irán cayendo más novelas de este magnifico autor, me parece que al 2024 lo voy a llamar 'Año Lehane'.

[Aitziber · Rating 2 out of 5]

Victim-Blaming: The Novel

(This review will contain so many spoilers you won't even know which ones are legitimate spoilers and which are the basic premise of the novel. You've been warned.)

Here's the thing: As a general rule, people don't like reading about victims. Oh, sure, it's cool if we read about victims who take their trauma and the shit they've been through and use that pain to grow stronger than before and take down the villain. But we don't like reading about the victims that don't get up.

While you're still considering whether the previous paragraph applies to you, I'll make my other point. Mystic River got really good reviews. The first few pages of my paperback are quotes from these reviews. Although many said the same thing, one in particular got my attention: "It's the kind of book a 'literary' novelist might write at the peak of his or her career." This ain't no genre novel, no! It doesn't follow a formula, the characters are complex, this book says something about human nature.

Or so both critics and publishers would have you believe.

So this is a book where three kids could've gotten spirited away by two pedophiles, but only the more naive, less confident one out of the three does. And the book makes it abundantly clear (although, to its credit, actually spares the reader the details) that the kid gets sexually abused. One of the kids grows up to be Supercop, an intelligent detective who's appeared on the papers for his great clearance rate. He's from the better part of the neighborhood. Another kid grows up to be a genius gangbanger. He thinks of every detail, he's good-looking and his smile lights up a room, he comes from the worse part of the neighborhood and he'd have never been caught if one former associate hadn't given him up. He's that smart. And the last one? Oh yeah, he's the kid who was abused, who now drinks, never amounted to much of anything and whose own wife actually much prefers the hot childhood friend criminal.

The book pitches Supercop against Hot Criminal in a battle against the clock. Either the cop figures out quick who killed Criminal's daughter, or Criminal will take justice into his own hands and kill the murderer himself. Unfortunately, the Victim was involved in some dark shit the day of the murder, and may find himself up shit creek without a paddle.

This is pure crime genre formula, which is fine. I love reading a good murder mystery. I read about real life cold cases all the time, about serial killers apprehended. As the Cracked article on victim blaming puts it, "[We want] a story with a villain who laughs evilly and a heroic underdog who fights back in a way we can all understand (that is, with violence)." But it's not literary fiction. It's the Hero Vs the Villain, both of them given the superpower of an extraordinary intelligence, and in the end, the child who was sexually abused and grew into murder victim, doesn't actually matter.

And Lehane makes sure Dave, the victim, doesn't actually matter. Mystic River could've actually been literary fiction, but the writer makes sure the novel doesn't actually say anything about anything.

To make it extra clear, Dave isn't actually a protagonist. His whole thing is that we don't know enough about him, or his motivations, until well into the novel, because to do so otherwise, would ruin the whodunnit that is the crux of crime fiction. If the reader, for whatever reason, felt some sympathy for his ordeal, wanted him to be okay, and survive the novel and get to turn his life around, Lehane makes sure the end is satisfying by ensuring the reader does not sympathize with Dave by the end of the novel. How? Well. See, Dave's horrific abuse experience made him kinda interested in little boys, himself. Oh God, he fights it, but he was bitten by a vampire as a child, and now he's a vampire himself (actual metaphor made in the novel). He's not even a person anymore, just a monster that needs to be taken down by the end of the story. No, he didn't kill Katie, but what does that matter if leaving him alive could've potentially meant he'd start diddling kids sooner or later? Criminal did everyone a favor by killing him. And even though Dave never actually comes out and tells another person that he's started having child-diddling thoughts, everyone sort of assumes that his experience made him fucked up enough that he would become a pedophile eventually. This is not subtext I picked up because I didn't like this book. That's actually in the novel.

So, here you have it. It's not only enough that a kid gets sexually abused, but he can't even catch a break later in life because his wife has a crush on the hot criminal, no one gives a shit about him, and anyway, it's reasonable for people not to give a fuck about child abuse victims, because apparently if you're abused as a kid, you become a pedophile.

At one point, I thought the novel could rise* to its reputation as literary fiction, if only Dave actually told Criminal his secret (that he's becoming a pedophile himself), and have Criminal believe that Dave didn't actually kill Katie, and yet kill Dave anyway. The reader gets so close to an actual somewhat novel point, that if Dave tells the truth and Criminal believes him and spares his life, Dave is as good as dead anyway, because who gets back from that? Who gets back from, "Well, getting in the car with the pedophiles not only fucked up my life at that point, but now I'm a monster, and now you know what I am too"? Instead, Dave lies that he was the one to kill Katie in the hopes that will make Criminal spare him, and so there's no revelation, no closure, no transcendental moment of holy shit I can't deal with this knowledge/moment of truth.

Not for Dave, anyway.

Because see, Criminal then goes back and has the Supercop spell the whole thing out for him. That's when Criminal gets his whole philosophy slapped out of him, the rug pulled from under him, the enormity of what he's done facing him. Not with Dave, because who gives a shit about the child abuse victim, am I right? But with his nemesis and actual protagonist, Supercop.

And by the way, the people who actually murdered Katie are two thirteen year olds whom videogames have turned psychopathic. Ha ha ha, damn. It's like it wasn't enough to use child abuse for shock and "depth" without actually getting into the psychology of trauma, but the book also needs a "Kids these days" subplot? This novel was written for judgy seniors who want to feel a bit supercop themselves, and I claim my five pounds.

[* I use "rise" not because I believe literary fiction is inherently above genre fiction --indeed, there's plenty of crap sold in the literary fiction aisle, and real good shit sold in the genre fiction aisle-- but because the critics who reviewed this novel seem to believe that, by being much better than genre fiction, Mystic River should be classified as literary fiction.

Also, I could've dedicated another part of the review to the roles wives, their fidelity, loyalty or lack thereof play in this novel, but the child abuse stuff was gross enough that I don't feel like opening that can of worms. Needless to say, it's not cute.]

[Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three friends and the doomed power of injuries..

A battered child choosing the lie in the face of death, because the truth is so enorm and monstrous he cannot uttered it..

The evil commited to the soul of a child reverberates and mould the lives of other people..
Three friends..

One of then, Dave is kinapped by two child molester for four days..
After this, nothing is the same again!!!

Decades latter:

Dave has a young beatiful wife and a son..

His wife loves him but know nothing what happened to his man..
The consequences are disastrous!!!

Jimmy has become a criminal and gangster..

His first wife died from skyn cancer..
A man must pay with his life..

Sean has become a detective and his wife has leave him with his baby girl..

He must fight his inner demons..
A murder case brings Sean to the border of despair and he is forced to make painful choices ..

Katie, Jimmys daughter is found in a park murdered, and her body dreadfully mutilated!!!

After this crime a chain reaction and events are started which will have sinister and dark implications for the three friends..

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane is a thriller and will captivate the reader from the first page on..
Yes, a sad story..

Lehane deals with the question of how much pain and suffering a human soul is capable to endure..
Love, trust, and loyalty in spite of heavy evidences..

This and much more awaits the reader in Mistyc River..

Wonderful written..

Believable characters..

An unexpected ending..

All this points sums to a total of five stars for me!!!

Loved it!!!

Full recommendation to all my goodread friends!!

Happy reading

Dean;)))

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, I found this sort of hard to read. It's one of those books that is is so saturated with descriptions of absolutely everything that it's hard for me to take it all in. I can't picture images in my head and I guess that's why I usually prefer books that follow a stream of consciousness. It wasn't easy for me to read the descriptions but the book was also hard to read because Lehane writes really long sentences. They seemed to go on and on forever and he lost me more than a few times. I also thought that this book was too long and the slow pace didn't really do it for me. I wouldn't go so far as to say Lehane's writing style isn't my preferred style because I thoroughly enjoyed Shutter Island. There were bits of the writing that I did enjoy but the bulk of it wasn't impressive to me.

Apart from the writing, the book was alright. I guessed who did it about halfway in and so I just spent the other half waiting to see if I was right. I was right but I had the wrong motive so I guess that's something. Although no, it's not really something because the motive was a bit meh to be honest. The main characters were pretty unlikeable but they were fully developed. I would have loved if there were more prominent women in the story. The women are pretty much kept on the sidelines apart from one whiny one called Celeste who was quite insufferable. I really wanted more Annabeth, she was complex, strong and interesting and yet she was just sidelined.

I wouldn't recommend this book but I would read more by Dennis Lehane.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"“It was like sitting through a movie, no matter how boring or confusing, until the end. Because at the end, sometimes things were explained or the ending itself was cool enough that you felt like sitting through all the boring stuff had been worth it”

“When had the pace picked up, left him staring at everyone’s backs?”

“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.”

“Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and the food.”

“It was the lack of a clear reason that got to Celeste most, and it stabbed her that a relationship that had once seemed unbreakable could slip apart so easily due to nothing more than time, family turmoil, and growth spurts.”

“...that did something permanent to you, spooned something out of you that you’d never get back.”

[Semjon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genauso stelle ich mir einen guten Kriminalroman vor. Dennis Lehane legt viel Wert darauf, die Beziehung zwischen den Menschen und ihren eigenen Ängsten und Bedürfnissen zu erzählen. Im Mittelpunkt stehen drei Jungs, die als 11jährige in Boston groß werden und deren Leben sich nach über 20 Jahren kreuzen. Der eine wurde Polizist, der andere Krimineller und der Dritte kämpft mit den Traumata aus der Kindheit. Und dann geschieht ein Mord und die Beziehungen der Menschen werden auf die Probe gestellt. Da dehnt sich die Geschichte dann gleich auf über 600 Seiten und bekommt stilistisch schon Stephen King Niveau. Ich mag das, wenn sich die Spannung langsam entwickelt. Wahrscheinlich kennt die halbe Welt schon die Clint Eastwood Verfilmung. Ich hatte das Glück (wie auch schon bei Lehanes Shutter Island), dass ich den Film nicht kannte und so diesen Krimi in vollen Zügen genießen konnte. Lehane schwingt sich langsam zu einem Lieblingsschriftsteller bei mir auf.

[Mike's Book Reviews]

Full video review here: https://youtu.be/1wrkv7nZmws

Quite possibly my book of the year. Just an incredible journey into the damages done in our childhood and how it can affect the adults we will become. Simply heartbreaking in more ways than one, especially if you are a parent. I will be reading more Dennis Lehane for sure. This was amazing.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm just saying there are threads, okay? Threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected. Say it rained in Dallas and so Kennedy didn't ride in a convertible. Stalin stayed in the seminary. Say you and me, Sean, say we got in that car with Dave Boyle.

A horrible murder is commited in a blue-collar neighborhood of Boston. Dennis Lehane goes far deeper than your regular crime writer into the motives and the conditions that led to the crime. He concentrates on the personalities of the people involved, on the secrets hidden deep under the faces they show to the world and how those secrets bleed into one another and destroy both the victim the perpetrator. To find the murderer, Lehane follows and unravels threads more than twenty-five years old, introducing three young boys forming an unlikely friendship (the parents are from wide apart social classes). Sean Devine is self-assured and a little arrogant, basking in his parents relative affluence; Jimmy Marcus is impulsive and dangerous, a product of a dysfunctional family; Dave Boyle is needy and fawning, annoying in his clinging to the other two boys. The friendship is cut short when a couple of strangers impersonating police officers kidnap Dave. Dave eventually escapes the child molesters (all this is part of the prologue, so no spoilers yet), but neither him nor the other two boys will ever forget the moment that Fate struck and changed their destiny. Because decades later, the beautiful, innocent daughter of Jimmy Marcus is found dead in a city park. Becasue Sean is the police officer tasked with investigating the murder. And because Dave is among the last persons to see the girl alive, and he is lying about his alibi. The three former friends have grown apart long ago, but the echoes of the childhood trauma is still haunting them and may reflect in the way they deal with the current crime.

The novel is not a fast-paced one, preferring instead the police procedural approach of meticulously gathering evidence and interviewing witnesses, taking into account the relationships and the histories of the whole neighborhood. It stands out for me most of all through the powerful evocation of the turmoil and rage visited on the relatives of the victim, the ones who have to deal with the aftermath of the crime, with the funeral arrangements, with the emptiness left behind by the missing girl, with the need to continue living for the sake of spouses and children and friends.

And often the worst thing wasn't the victims - they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who's loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact sometimes happen.

Still, the novel is not simply a psychological study of trauma and works well enough as a mystery, throwing sufficient doubt about the main suspect to keep the reader guessing until almost the last page. I did get an inkling about the identity of the culprit early on, but it was deftly done, in a blink-and-you-miss-it couple of clues. Anyway, there is more to the story than finding the identity of the murderer. There are the decisions taken by the survivors, mourning walking hand in hand with the thirst for revenge. There is a closure to be found for the car incident from twenty-five years ago. There is the neighborhood that endures and absorbs the pain and learns to go on.

It is difficult to explain how each of the three friends dealt with the past without spoiling major events later on, but I will give it a try : Jimmy has chosen the path of a criminal career, cut up short not so much by prison time, but by he need to take care of his orphaned daughter. Sean is struggling with depression, a common hazard in a policeman, aggravated by a separation from his wife. Dave has the worst problems, but is he solely to blame for his schizophrenic condition or is the society who ignored his need for counselling and support partly responsible?

I have talked mostly about boys who become men, but the women in the novel are as important and often stronger than their husbands or fathers or boyfriends. They can either raise them above themselves or bury them deeper in trouble. Their suffering is moe keen and more bitter than the men's, who find escape either in drink or in violence. Insecure Celeste Boyle, the absent Lauren Devine and especially rock-hard Annabeth Marcus will stand out and be counted as active players in the unfolding drama.

More than the story, I was captivated by the talent of the author to write about the human element of the crime. Fingerprints, blood analysis, balistics, interrogation techniques are all important, but the resolution turns on the personalities and hidden identities of the actors. Jimmy is all about control:

Lotta things are in my blood. Doesn't mean they have to come out.

Sean is all about his failed marriage and ensuing depression:

Lately, though, he's just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio that sounded exactly like other songs on the radio he'd heard years before and hadn't liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people's clothes and other people's hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. Tired of office politics and who was screwing who, both figuratively and otherwise. He'd gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he'd heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn't seemed fresh the first time he's heard them.

and Dave is all about the fight between the after-effects of his childhood trauma and his efforts to lead a normal family life.

Unaware, then, how short futures could be. How quick they could disappear, leave you with nothing but a long-ass present that held no surprises, no reason for hope, nothing but days that bled into one another with so little impact that another year was over and the calendar page in the kitchen was still stuck on March.

These passages I have selected give, I hope an idea of the empathy and involvement with the subject demonstrated by Lehane, and also showcase his strong, evocative prose. the author. I was not aware of his biographical details, and actually wondered why is the novel titled "Mystic River"? Turns out Lehane grew up in a similar neighborhood of Boston as the one described in the novel, and that the place has as much to do with the shaping of the destinies of the three friends as the event from their childhood. The social separation between the poor Flats and the affluent Point, the criminal traditions of the Irish and Italian gangs operating in the city, the mostly Catholic upbringing of the majority of the inhabitants, the recent gentrification trend that brings in yuppies from the suburbs and pushes the old tenants out into even more insalubrious parts of the city - all of these factors are reflected in the hearts and soul of the locals.

You came back here because you'd built this village, you knew its dangers and its pleasures, and most important, nothing that happened here surprised you. There was a logic to the corruption and the bloodbaths and the bar fights and the stickball games and the Saturday-morning lovemaking. No one else saw the logic, and that was the point. No one else was welcome here.

I have recently read a comment about how many genre books are similar in style and content and have limited appeal outside a circle of dedicated fans. But that we also keep reading them, digging through the drudge in the hope that one day we will come across a true gem, a story so well written and so moving that it will transcend genre limitations and touch directly the core of our beings, of our beliefs and our dreams. Dennis Lehane did this for me with "Mystic River" and I will go back to his other novels, hoping they are at least as good as the first one I tried.