Mystic River

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What to expect

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. 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...

Critics Review

Heart-scorching... penetrating... a powerhouse of a novel
New York Times Book Review
Lehane's best book by far. Like all his writing, it shimmers with great dialogue and a complex view of the world
Newsweek
Lehane spares nothing in his wrenching descriptions of how a crime in the neighborhood kills the neighborhood, taking it down house by house, family by family. Although his deeply scored characterizations of the three former friends carry the soul of his story, Lehane's penetrating studies of their neighbors -- including some of the strongest and saddest women you'll ever meet in this genre - are no less vital. If you really want to know when innocence dies, just look these people in the eye
New York Times
Not even Pelecanos has gone so far into the nitty-gritty of working-class lives to have a sequence where a character is doing the ironing and ruminating on the best kinds of iron to buy. Lehane does, but then that's of a piece with the rest of this marvellous book. He's content to go slow, even though he's writing a thriller, so that we get to know and really care about all his main characters. The result is enormously impressive: page-turning but thoughtful; moving in its sad inevitability. One of the finest novels I've read in ages.
Observer
Get Dennis Lehane's Mystic River. Boy, does he know how to write
Elmore Leonard
One of the greats of crime writing
Guardian
Tells the story of three childhood friends, and how both their youth and their friendship were taken from them in a single day.... In Lehane's books, everyone grows up, but no one escapes
Entertainment Weekly
[An] emotionally wrenching crime drama about the effects of a savage killing on a tightly knit, blue-collar Boston neighborhood...Lehane's story slams the reader with uncomfortable images, a beautifully rendered setting and an unnerving finale
Publishers Weekly, starred review

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