Mystic River [Paperback]

Dennis Lehane's Mystic River takes the material of the ordinary police procedural thriller and shapes it into heart-break. As boys, Jimmy, Dave and Sean were friends, until one day Dave was abducted by two men pretending to be cops, and was never quite the same again. As men, Dave is a damaged fantasist, safe in a quietly happy marriage; Jimmy a retired criminal making a good respectable living for the sake of his children; and Sean is the homicide cop who finds himself investigating the murder of Jimmy's eldest daughter Katie. This is not just a book about what becomes of the children who grow into adults; it is about what happens to a neighbourhood when the rules change, when an old established working-class district acquires gentrified espresso bars at one end and the beats of the city's most dangerous whores at the other. It is also a book about the tragedy of all sudden violent deaths; we never forget our sense of Katie as she was, dancing on the last night of her life--she is never just the corpse here, never just the object of mourning and investigation. --Roz Kaveney --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

'Enormously impressive: page-turning but thoughtful; moving in its sad inevitability… One of the finest novels I've read in ages'

'Dennis Lehane establishes himself as one of the greats of crime-writing with MYSTIC RIVER'

'Heart-scorching…penetrating…a powerhouse of a novel'

'Lehane's best book by far. Like all his writing, it shimmers with great dialogue and a complex view of the world'

'Get Dennis Lehane's MYSTIC RIVER. Boy, does he know how to write'

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 for ever. 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's daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine is assigned the case. His personal life unravelling, he must go back into a world he thought he'd left behind to confront not only the violence of the present but the nightmares of his past. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy Marcus, who finds his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve 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. While Sean Devine attempts to use the law to return peace and order to the neighbourhood, Jimmy Marcus finds his need for vengeance pushing him ever closer to a moral abyss from which he won't be able to return, and Dave's wife, Celeste, sleeps at night with a man she fears may very well be a monster, a monster who fathered her child and hides his true nature from everyone, possibly even himself. At once a tense and unnerving psychological thriller, MYSTIC RIVER is also an epic novel of love and loyalty, faith and family, in which people irrevocably marked by the past find themselves on a collision course with the darkest truths of their own hidden selves.

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's daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine is assigned the case. His personal life unravelling, he must go back into a world he thought he'd left behind to confront not only the violence of the present but the nightmares of his past. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy Marcus, who finds his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve 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...

Dennis Lehane is the author of A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR (which won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel); DARKNESS, TAKE MY HAND; SACRED; GONE, BABY, GONE; PRAYERS FOR RAIN and MYSTIC RIVER. A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts he lives in the Boston area with his wife, Sheila, and their two English bulldogs, Marlon and Stella.

When Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus were kids, their fathers worked together at the Coleman Candy plant and carried the stench of warm chocolate back home with them. It became a permanent character of their clothes, the beds they slept in, the vinyl backs of their car seats. Sean’s kitchen smelled like a Fudgsicle, his bathroom like a Coleman Chew-Chew bar. By the time they were eleven, Sean and Jimmy had developed a hatred of sweets so total that they took their coffee black for the rest of their lives and never ate dessert.
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 from his uncles. From the other side of the kitchen window screen, they could hear the hiss of the beer can pull-tabs, bursts of hard, sudden laughter, and the heavy snap of Zippos as Mr Devine and Mr Marcus lit their Luckys.
Sean’s father, a foreman, had the better job. He was tall and fair and had a loose, easy smile that Sean had seen calm his mother’s anger more than a few times, just shut it down like a switch had been flicked off inside of her. Jimmy’s father loaded the trucks. He was small and his dark hair fell over his forehead in a tangle and something in his eyes seemed to buzz all the time. He had a way of moving too quickly; you’d blink and he was on the other side of the room. Dave Boyle didn’t have a father, just a lot of uncles, and the only reason he was usually there on those Saturdays was because he had this gift for attaching himself to Jimmy like lint; he’d see him leaving his house with his father, show up beside their car, half out of breath, going ‘What’s up, Jimmy?’ with a sad hopefulness.
They all lived in East Buckingham, just west of downtown, a neighborhood of cramped corner stores, small playgrounds, and butcher shops where meat, still pink with blood, hung in the windows. The bars had Irish names and Dodge Darts by the curbs. Women wore handkerchiefs tied off at the backs of their skulls and carried mock leather snap purses
for their cigarettes. Until a couple of years ago, older boys had been plucked from the streets, as if by spaceships, and sent to war. They came back hollow and sullen a year or so later, or they didn’t come back at all. Days, the mothers searched the papers for coupons. Nights, the fathers went to the bars. You knew everyone; nobody except those older boys ever left.
Jimmy and Dave came from the Flats, down by the Penitentiary Channel on the south side of Buckingham Avenue. It was only twelve blocks from Sean’s street, but the Devines were north of the Ave., part of the Point, and the Point and the Flats didn’t mix much.
It wasn’t like the Point glittered with gold streets and silver spoons. It was just the Point, working class, blue collar, Chevys and Fords and Dodges parked in front of simple A-frames and the occasional small Victorian. But people in the Point owned. People in the Flats rented. Point families went to church, stayed together, held signs on street corners during election months. The Flats, though, who knew what they did, living like animals sometimes, ten to an apartment, trash in their streets – Wellieville, Sean and his friends at Saint Mike’s called it, families living on the dole, sending their kids to public schools, divorcing. So while Sean went to Saint Mike’s Parochial in black pants, black tie, and blue shirt, Jimmy and Dave went to the Lewis M. Dewey School on Blaxston. Kids at
the Looey & Dooey got to wear street clothes, which was cool, but they usually wore the same ones three out of five days, which wasn’t. There was an aura of grease to them – greasy hair, greasy skin, greasy collars and cuffs. A lot of the boys had bumpy welts of acne and dropped out early. A few of the girls wore maternity dresses to graduation.
So if it wasn’t for their fathers, they probably never would have been friends. During the week, they never hung out, but they had those Saturdays, and there was something to those days, whether they hung out in the backyard, or wandered through the gravel dumps off Harvest Street, or hopped the subways and rode downtown – not to see anything, just to move through the dark tunnels and hear the rattle and brake-scream of the cars as they cornered the tracks and the lights flickered on and off – that felt to Sean like a held breath. Anything could happen when you were with Jimmy. If he was aware there were rules – in the subway, on the streets, in a movie theater – he never showed it.
They were at South Station once, tossing an orange street hockey ball back and forth on the platform, and Jimmy missed Sean’s throw and the ball bounced down onto the tracks. Before it occurred to Sean that Jimmy could even be thinking about it, Jimmy jumped off the platform and down onto the track, down there with the mice and the rats and
the third rail.
People on the platform went nuts. They screamed at Jimmy. One woman turned the color of cigar ash as she bent at the knees and yelled, Get back up here, get back up here now, goddamnit! Sean heard a thick rumble that could have been a train entering the tunnel up at Washington Street or could have been trucks rolling along the street above, and the people on the platform heard it, too.