Book Description
Sean, Jimmy and Dave were childhood friends. One day one of the boys got into a strange car where something terrible happened that ended their friendship and changed them all forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean works as a homicides detective, Jimmy is an ex-convict, and Dave tries to maintain his demons hidden: demons that make him do terrible things. Mystic River has been made into film by Clint Eastwood, carried out by Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon. Description in Spanish: Cuando eran niños, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus y Dave Boyle eran amigos. Un día, un extraño coche se detuvo en su calle. Uno de los chicos subió al coche, pero los otros dos no lo hicieron. Y sucedió algo terrible, algo que acabó con su amistad y que les cambió a los tres para siempre. Veinticinco años más tarde, Devine trabaja de detective para el Departamento de Homicidios, Marcus es un ex convicto que tiene una tienda de barrio, y Boyle intenta salvar su matrimonio y mantener sus demonios a raya: demonios que le incitan a hacer cosas terribles. Mystic River ha sido llevada al cine por Clint Eastwood, protagonizada por Seann Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon y Laurance Fishburne.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
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 Sheehan

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has been published by Subterranean Press

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Cuando eran ni￯﾿ﾽos, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus y Dave Boyle eran amigos. Un día, un extraño coche se detuvo en su calle. Uno de los chicos subió al coche, pero los otros dos no lo hicieron. Y sucedió algo terrible, algo que acabó con su amistad y que les cambió a los tres para siempre.

Veinticinco años más tarde, Devine trabaja de detective para el Departamento de Homicidios, Marcus es un ex convicto que tiene una tienda de barrio, y Boyle intenta salvar su matrimonio y mantener sus demonios a raya: demonios que le incitan a hacer cosas terribles.

Mystic River ha sido llevada al cine por Clint Eastwood, protagonizada por Seann Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon y Laurence Fishburne.

FROM THE CRITICS

Cleveland Plain Dealer

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.

Esquire

Dennis Lehane is one of the very best young mystery writers.

Elmore Leonard

Get Dennis Lehane's Mystic River. Boy does he know how to write.

Michael Connelly

Dennis Lehane is the heir apparent...his voice is an original.

Orlando Sentinel

Heartbreaking....Like Bruce Springsteen's song 'The River,' Lehane's Mystic River looks back at what might have been, the ways in which the past impinges on the present. And like the song, you can't get it out of your head. "Springsteen's narrator says, "Now those memories come back to haunt me/ They haunt me like a curse/ Is a dream a lie if it don't come true/ Or is it something worse?" Ask Jimmy Marcus, Dave Boyle, Sean Devine. Ask Dennis Lehane. Read all 21 "From The Critics" >

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