So intense! One of the best mystery/thriller books I have ever read. Not just a detective novel but also psychological. The characters are portrayed superbly. 5 stars.

Dave, Sean and Jimmy where childhood friends, but things changed when Dave gets into a stranger’s car and the others don’t. Twenty five years later all three are completely differently people. Sean is a detective, Jimmy is an ex-convict and Dave is just a shell of a man; never quite recovering from the emotionally scarring events of his past. Their lives come together again when Jimmy’s daughter is found brutally murdered, Dave returns home covered in blood and Sean is put on the case to find wh More...

The lives of three men who knew each other as kids – Sean, now a cop, Jimmy, a reformed criminal, and Dave, who was abducted and molested as a child and is now something of a loser – intersect when Jimmy’s daughter is found brutally murdered. As Sean and Jimmy both investigate, secrets from all three men’s lives are revealed. Did Dave’s abduction turn him into a savage killer under his family-man nebbish exterior? Or did Jimmy’s underworld enemies plan a revenge hit? Each revelation is more dest More...

Dua puluh lima tahun yang lalu, Dave Boyle masuk ke dalam sebuah mobil dan menghilang selama empat hari. Kedua temannya, Jimmy Marcus dan Sean Devine cukup "pintar" untuk tidak naik ke dalam mobil yang mereka kira mobil polisi itu. Dave ternyata diculik oleh dua orang pria pedofil, dan dia cukup beruntung untuk bisa keluar dari neraka itu dan kembali kepada ibunya yang gila. Oh, Dave sudah tidak punya ayah.
Sejak saat itu, tiga orang ini tidak bermain bersama lagi dan menjalani takdir mereka yan More...

Steeped as it is in such uplifting topics as childhood sex abuse; repressed pedophilic desire; betrayal; broken friendships; broken people; doomed love; the pain of loss; brutal, senseless murder; the stifling nature of the stoic, emotionally-contained masculine ideal; and tragically misguided attempts at retribution and revenge, Mystic River is an enjoyable and deeply satisfying read. Dennis Lehane paints a vivid, beautifully romantic-yet-depressing portrait of various lives in an economically More...

E' molto difficile essere diversi da ciò che si è. Apparentemente banale ma dalle profonde implicazioni, questa è la verità che si cela dietro questo bel romanzo. Inquietante, un ritmo lento ma ricco di accadimenti.
Child in time

Dolce figlio del tempo vedrai la linea
La linea che separa il bene dal male
Vedrai il cieco che spara al mondo
Pallottole volanti che riscuotono pedaggi
Se sei stato cattivo, oh Signore, lo scommetto,
e se sei stato colpito da piombo volante
Faresti bene a chiudere gli oc More...

Twenty five years after Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle had their boyhood friendship torn apart by an abduction of one of the boys, in the street where they were playing, a murder has brought them all together again.

Sean is now a homicide detective, married to Lauren, but separated, with a daughter he hadn’t seen yet…..and when Jimmy’s nineteen year old daughter Katie, is murdered in the early hours of a Sunday morning, Sean is assigned to the case. He is just back to work from a weeks More...

Wow. I had seen the movie a few years ago, and thought it was OK. I recently started reading LeHane's murder mystery books, and found them enjoyable, quick reading - sometimes a bit too heavy on graphic violence for my taste. But this one ... wow. Tough to do justice to in a movie, since so much dialogue takes place in the characters heads. More of a psychological thriller, with fully drawn characters, than just a detective novel, it completely sucked me in. Can people really change their basic More...

I finally got around to reading Mystic River about a month ago at the recommendation of a few Lehane fans, both diehard and casual, and it did not let me down. Even though I saw the movie years ago when it came out, the novel was still surprising (and better than the movie for offering much more nuance and inner psychological turmoil). (One problem with seeing a movie before reading the book is the inability to picture the characters as anything but as the actors that portrayed them. For example More...

“It had occurred to Sean once - on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical - that maybe they HAD gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they'd become if they ever escaped and grew up.”

When three young boys in 1970s Boston encounter a pair of child molest More...

I'm not a fan of Sean Penn, so I never even wanted to see this movie, and didn't even know that there was a book until after I'd read Lehane's other book Shutter Island, which I really enjoyed. So when I saw that my library had this on audio, I borrowed it, and have just now got around to listening to it.

I think that this was a pretty good story, but it wasn't really as gut-wrenching or as horrifying as I'd expected it to be, knowing that it was about the murder of the daughter of one of the ma More...

Dennis Lehane, Mystic River (Morrow, 2000)

Lehane is still an "under the radar" writer, to an extent, but his reputation grows with each novel. Mystic River, his fifth, should help his rep along just fine.

It's the story of three kids, later grown-ups. Ostensibly it's about the abduction of one of them and how the effects of that abduction have repercussions later on in their lives. But as with all the best mystery novels (and it's really something of a stretch to classify this as a mystery, actua More...

Lehane's Pacing and Writing Style are, to use a cliched expression - amazing. He brings the book to life with his style of writing , describing the sights, smells, and sounds in such a way , that I want to run up to Boston and see if it really is the way he describes it.

As far as the plot is concerned , I'm sure if you're reading this review, you have some idea based off watching the movie or hearing about the book. The central idea is how a chance event that happened one Sunny Saturday afternoo More...

I saw the movie before I read the book. The book was better than the movie, but not all that much better. Both the movie and book were really good. I think the main theme of both is masculinity, being a man in early 21st century America. (Although I may be a little off on the time frame and it is about being a man in late 20th century America.) My main problem with both the book and the movie is that the hero of the story is supposed to be the cop, but since I am an anarchist, I'm not so into th More...

Intense. Would have given it 5 stars if I hadn't figured out whodunnit less than 100 pages in. I hate it when I do that. Great book.

In 1975, three 11-year-old boys--Dave Boyle, Sean Devine, and Jimmy Marcus-- from a working class suburb of Boston were playmates. One day, a car came along, and two men who claimed to be police officers threatened the boys for fighting and demanded that they enter the car to be taken to the police station. Instinctively, Jimmy and Sean refused; Dave, far more timid and uncertain, got in. Four days later, he returned to the neighborhood, after escaping from the men who turned out to be pedophile More...

I originally saw the movie version of this book, which was terrific. It was directed by Clint Eastwood and starred Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon, and Tim Robbins. I went back to the book after seeing another searing movie adaptation of Lehane's "Gone Baby, Gone."

A devastaing story that touches on the theme of how our pasts continually influence the present. This novel can be read on many levels.

Set in Boston first in the 80s and than later in the early 2000s, it brings together three childhood friends More...

Bostonian Dennis Lehane's sixth novel, Mystic River starts out as a delightful read. The first page hooked me for its literary quality. I quote from page three:

On Saturdays, Jimmy’s father would drop by the Devines’ to have a beer with Sean’s father. He’d bring Jimmy with him, and as one beer turned into six, plus two or three shots of Dewar’s, Jimmy and Sean would play in the backyard, sometimes with Dave Boyle, a kid with girl’s wrists and weak eyes who was always telling jokes he’d learned fr More...

Children experts say we are who we are by aged three, that our roles and paths in our lives, families and communities have already started to be laid out. Perhaps that is so, I fear it is and through his book, Lehane shows that. A bully cop approaches three young boys playing in street and he orders me into his car. Two defy him, but the third gets in even faced with his friends standing firm in defiance, and shouting at him to not get in. Their lives and friendship are forever changed. As adult More...

Dennis Lehane spread his net wider and deeper with his first novel outside his first-person-narrator Kenzie/Gennaro crime series, and the result was a resounding winner. Lehane goes a little lighter on the brutality and a lot easier on the wiseguy humor in "Mystic River." Don't get me wrong. I loved the Kenzie-Gennaro edgy "new noir" detective series, but this is a more mature and deeply felt effort.

With my having finally read "Mystic River," it joins a select group of works in which I saw the m More...

The only word I can find to do justice to this book is devastating: devastatingly beautiful and devastatingly sad. Mystic River is tragedy before anything else. I would argue that the tragedy of this novel is its defining characteristic: I don't think calling this a mystery does it justice.

To be fair, Lehane, does his share of procedural stand-bys: interrogations, sudden insights, the ubiquitous teaser where the reader is introduced to the victim and then witnesses just enough of the crime to ne More...

A quote from Mystic River heads an early chapter in Ken Bruen's novel Blitz--one "twisted genius" quoting another. I read MR as a follow-up to that quote.

Why do we read such books? Not, surely, because we hope to learn about ourselves. Bruen's characters, Taylor and Brant, live in a world entirely different, if not apart from our own. And Lehane, praised for his ability to create "crystal-clear portraits of humanity and then place them in the darker side of life," can't have much to say about th More...

Take the characters in James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy, pollute their gene pool, give it time to trickle into the future and into Boston . . . and you've got Mystic River.

I can't possibly rate this book, and I'll explain why below.

The writing is stellar. In fact, it left me a bit breathless. Vivid and evocative, it's a perfect conjuration of a particular place at a particular time. The mystery, too, is riveting. I filched hours from other activities to finish Mystic River.

It wasn't More...

lo so che non si fa...ma sono stanca per trovare le parole, però mi è piaciuto tanto e allora: cit.
"Celeste si svegliò la domenica mattina pensando alle tubature: l'intrico di tubi che attraversava le case, i ristoranti, i cinema e i centri commerciali,si arrampicava lungo palazzi di quaranta piani, un piano dopo l'altro, e finiva nel più vasto labirinto di fogne e acquedotti sotto paesi e città. Una rete che univa le persone più della lingua, con l'unico scopo di allontanare i resti di quello c More...

When Dave Boyle gets into the car of two strangers pretending to be cops, it changes the lives of three childhood friends, Dave, Jimmy and Sean, forever. Dave comes back after 4 days but isn't quite the same kid anymore. Years later the daughter of Jimmy is found murdered in a wooded area of a small blue collar community. Soon Dave becomes a suspect when he came homes the night of the murder with blood on him, but not his blood. As Sean, who is now a cop, investigates the killing, Jimmy starts l More...

Non pensavo.Davvero, non pensavo che questo libro mi colpisse tanto.Sì, sapevo che ne era stato tratto un (mi dicono) bellissimo film di Clint Eastwood, vincitore di un Oscar; conoscevo la bravura di Lehane grazie ai romanzi che tanto ho amato; sapevo anche che si trattava di un libro più duro, con nessuna concessione all'ironia tanto presente nei romanzi con Pat Kenzie ed Angie Gennaro.Eppure, pur sapendo tutto questo, è riuscito a spiazzarmi ugualmente: Lehane entra nella parte oscura di Bosto More...

I found this novel gripping and could not put it down, it starts off with 3 young boys, 2 of these come from dysfunctional families and the author paints a bleak picture of life in a town where unemployment and, alcoholism are a blight. The boys are friends but there is always an edge to the friendships maybe because 3 is a crowd. One day a fight breaks out amongst them in the street, the next moment a police car appears and 1 boy is put in the police car and is not seen again for 4 days. This e More...