MYSTIC RIVER by Dennis Lehane - SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK
See all titles by Dennis Lehane.
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.
