Book Reviews
A powerhouse of a...novel...heart-scorching...penetrating.... Lehane's deeply scored characterizations of the three former friends carries the soul of this story...if you really want to know when innocence dies, just look these people in the eye.
The New York Times Book Review
Mystic River is the novel most writers can only dream of writing. Both a thrilling suspense story and a compassionate study of the human heart, it also manages to be funny, heartbreaking and pensive. And Dennis Lehane accomplishes all this in prose so dazzling in its deceptive simplicity that readers will find something to appreciate on almost every page.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
After publishing five books in the popular series featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, Dennis Lehane (A Drink Before the War, Prayers for Rain) has finally come into his own. With Mystic River, a passionate, ambitious novel of crime, punishment, and misplaced revenge, Lehane fulfills his early promise and takes his place as an important American writer.
Mystic River begins in 1975 in the blue-collar Boston community of East Buckingham. The defining event of the novel occurs when three young boys—Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle—encounter a pair of roving child molesters who pass themselves off as policemen. Two of the boys—Jimmy and Sean—escape, but ten-year-old Dave Boyle is not so fortunate and finds himself trapped in a four-day ordeal that changes his life forever.
Lehane then moves the narrative forward to a critical week in the summer of 2000. Sean Devine is now a homicide investigator for the Massachusetts State Police. His marriage has recently ended, and both his personal and professional lives are in disarray. The charismatic Jimmy Marcus is an ex-con who has opted for the straight life and is raising a family and working as the proprietor of a local mom-and-pop grocery. Dave Boyle, whose life peaked during his glory days as a high school baseball star, is a husband and father who has drifted through a series of dead-end jobs and is struggling continuously with the poisonous impulses that are the primary legacy of his abduction.
The lives of these men converge once again when Katie Marcus, Jimmy's oldest daughter, is murdered. As Jimmy grieves and plots revenge, Sean initiates a wide-ranging investigation that gradually illuminates the entire social structure of East Buckingham, a working-class neighborhood with its own peculiar history, myths, and tribal rituals. The investigation also raises troubling questions about the possible involvement of the deeply damaged Dave Boyle, whose path crossed Katie's on the night of her death. Dave's mysterious behavior and contradictory accounts of his actions make him a highly plausible suspect and set the stage for a violent—and ironic—denouement.
Mystic River is both a murder mystery and a novel of character. Like the very best fiction, it is, in the end, about many things: grief, sin, karma, hope and the lack of hope, the inevitability of change, the primal importance of family ties, the vulnerability of children, and the countless ways in which past events continue to influence the present. However you choose to read it, Mystic River is a deeply felt, beautifully composed novel by a gifted young writer who keeps getting better and who is helping to set the standards by which 21st-century crime fiction will ultimately be judged.
Bill Sheenan - Barnes and Noble Editors
Lehane's new novel is about secrets: the people who keep secrets and those who fall victim to them. In this book, the first not to feature private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, everyone has something to hide.
The book revolves around the lives of three Irish kids, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle, living in the East Buckingham area of Boston. Predominantly inhabited by poor Irish-Americans, East Buckingham is divided into two sections, the Point and the Flats. Devine lives in the Point section of East Buckingham, and Marcus and Boyle live twelve blocks south, in the Flats. For the most part, the Point and the Flats had little to do with each other; those who live in the Flats view those who live in the Point as low-lives—as the kind of Irish who deserve their bad-boy reputation. The story opens in 1975 when Devine, Marcus and Boyle are accosted by two pedophiles who pass themselves off as police officers. Boyle, unaware of the men's real motivations, gets into the car and disappears. When he returns four days later, having escaped, nothing is the same. Devin and Marcus, unable to overcome feeling of guilt for allowing Boyle to get into the car, quickly drift apart and retreat to their respective neighborhoods.
Twenty-five years later their story resumes. Marcus is now an ex-con gone straight who raised his young daughter, Katie, after the death of his first wife; Devine is a homicide detective with the State Police; and the still-tormented Boyle is married with a son. Now nineteen-year-old Katie has been murdered, and Devine has been assigned to investigate the case. Boyle, who was one of the last people to see Katie alive, arrives home late the same night with his clothing covered in blood. Boyle tells his wife that he had to defend himself in a mugging, but his story has more holes than a golf course. His suffering wife jumps to his aid, cleaning his clothes, bleaching out the drains to destroy any incriminating evidence, throwing herself into what she perceives is her duty to protect her husband. It is as though she has waited her entire life for this opportunity to rise to the occasion; she both embraces it and is repelled by its implications.
Meanwhile, Boyle still has not talked to anyone about what happened to him twenty-five years earlier, and the secret is eating away at him. Boyle feels himself slowly being replaced by what he calls the Wolf Boy, and the Wolf Boy has desires that scare the hell out of Boyle. Devine and Marcus are harboring corrosive secrets of their own. Twenty-five years after that fateful day in 1975, Devine is still riddled with survivor's guilt. One of Devine's secrets is that he knew better, but that did nothing to stop it from happening. Marcus, for his part, shares that same guilt but has other, deadly secrets of his own, stemming from his days as the ringleader of a successful gang of thieves.
The characters in this book exist in a claustrophobic world where everyone knows everyone else or is related to everyone else—Boyle's wife and Marcus's wife are cousins; and Marcus's wife's brothers, the Savages, are widely known as the neighborhood's dim-witted thugs. This is a world that is both completely familiar and unfamiliar to its inhabitants. Yuppies are moving into the Point, gentrifying everything they can lay deed to, and everywhere there seems to be an air of desperation and anger as one world is being swallowed up by another.
In many important ways, this is Lehane's best book. It possesses a sustained sense of urgency (except for the 1975 prelude, the whole of the story takes place over just a few days) and is a huge step up in its subject matter. Where it falters, oddly, is also in its storytelling. Information that the reader is given but is not supposed to have paid attention to stands out glaringly. When a crucial piece of the puzzle is laid on the table, I knew in a heart beat who the murderer was and what the whole setup was and who the red herring was—all this with another one hundred-fifty pages to go. That kind of blunder is especially maddening in a book that is otherwise so darn good. Sure, it makes the reader feel bright, putting it all together, but it also undermines the payoff. It's a tradeoff that I hope Lehane has gotten out of his system.
Book Magazine
Lehane ventures beyond his acclaimed private eye series with this emotionally wrenching crime drama about the effects of a savage killing on a tightly knit, blue-collar Boston neighborhood. Written with a sensitivity toward character that exceeds his previous efforts, the story tracks the friendship of three boys from a defining moment in their childhood, when 11-year-old Dave Boyle was abducted off the streets of East Buckingham and sexually molested by two men before managing to escape. Boyle, Jimmy Marcus and Sean Devine grow apart as the years pass, but a quarter century later they are thrust back together when Marcus's 19-year-old daughter, Katie, is murdered in a local park. Marcus, a reformed master thief turned family man, goes through a period of intense grief, followed by a thirst for revenge. Devine, now a homicide cop assigned to the murder, tries to control his old friend while working to make sense of the baffling case, which involves turning over the past as much as it does sifting through new evidence. In time, Devine begins to suspect Boyle, a man of many ghoulish secrets who has led a double life ever since the molestation. Lehane's story slams the reader with uncomfortable images, a beautifully rendered setting and an unnerving finale. With his sixth novel, the author has replaced the graphic descriptions of crime and violence found in his Patrick Kenzie-Angela Gennaro series (Prayers for Rain; Gone, Baby, Gone) with a more pensive, inward view of life's dark corners. It's a change that garners his themes—regret over life choices, the psychological imprints of childhood, personal and professional compromise—a richer context and his characters a deeper exploration.
Publishers Weekly
In his fifth novel, and his first not involving P.I. Patrick Kenzie (Prayers for Rain), Lehane once again proves himself nonpareil in writing about the dark side of the human character. Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle are childhood friends until Dave's abduction by, and subsequent escape from, a couple of child molesters. Twenty-five years later, having grown apart, they are thrown together again by the murder of Jimmy's daughter, Katie. Jimmy is the grieving father out for vengeance, Sean the investigating officer, and Dave a possible suspect. The investigation forces each man to face his past and to examine the paths they have followed since the fateful day when Dave was abducted. What separates Lehane's work from standard noir fare is his ability to endow his characters with such complexity that the reader may understand their actions, even while not necessarily agreeing with them. He has crafted another winner this time around, one certain to move quickly off public library shelves. — Craig Shufelt, Gladwin Cty. Lib., MI
Library Journal
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that's as dark as any of Patrick's cases. Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean's parents' house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy's friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it's Jimmy's turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he's got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who's done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend's official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave's wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else's blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it's easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all. An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters' heads.
Kirkus Reviews