Book
Mystic river
Record details
- ISBN: 0060584750 (Dark Alley : pbk.)
- ISBN: 0688163165 (hc)
- ISBN: 9780688163167 (hc)
- ISBN: 9780060584757 (Dark Alley : pbk.)
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Physical Description:
401 p. ; 24 cm. | paperback
print - Edition: 1st ed.
- Publisher: New York : William Morrow, c2001.
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Friendship in children -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- Fiction Police -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- Fiction Murder -- Massachusetts -- Boston -- Fiction Boston (Mass.) -- Fiction |
| Genre: | Psychological fiction. Mystery fiction. Mystery fiction. |
Available copies
- 5 of 5 copies available at BC Interlibrary Connect. (Show)
- 0 of 0 copies available at Creston Public Library.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 5 total copies.
| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
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More information
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Monthly Selections - #2 November 2000
This popular writer just keeps getting better and better, and this sharp, intelligent, suspenseful novel is sure to win him a lot of new fans. As children, Jimmy, Sean, and Dave have an odd kind of friendship, born more of geographical convenience than any actual affection for one another. A quarter-century later, Sean is a Boston police officer, Jimmy is an ex-con, and Dave is . . . well, let's just say he's got a lot of things to hide, including the truth behind something that happened a long time ago. When Jimmy's daughter is murdered, the three former friends are thrown together again, but this time at least one of them apparently is bound for self-destruction. Lehane's steadily growing reputation has been based, up until now, on his superlative Patrick Kenzie-Angie Gennaro series. Here he proves equally adept outside the series structure. Lehane is one of the small group of crime writers whose novels reveal a deep fascination with people, with motivation and inner turmoil and the subtle things that make characters walk off the page. As with the best crime writers, we rarely worry about solving a puzzle when we read Lehane. His people are too compelling for that. It's time to stop talking about Lehane as an up-and-coming genre star and acknowledge that he is one of our best fiction writers period. --David PittCopyright 2000 Booklist Reviews - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 2001 February
Mysteries mystical and morbidMysteries don't come much grittier than Dennis Lehane's latest, Mystic River (audio). In the mid-1970s, three young boys roughhouse in a suburban Boston street. An unmarked car pulls up alongside, and a plainclothes cop breaks up the battle, sending two of the kids home and taking the third one away. It turns out that the "cop" is a pedophile who abuses the child before leaving him to die in an unused bunker. Days pass; hopes erode. Then, as if by a miracle, the child turns up, somewhat the worse for wear, but alive. Fast-forward 25 years: one of the boys has gone on to become a homicide detective, one a career criminal, one a tortured ne'er do well. When the daughter of the career criminal is brutally murdered, it falls to the homicide detective to investigate her death. Almost immediately suspicion falls upon the third member of the childhood trio, and it becomes a race between the detective and the murdered girl's father as to which will be the one to mete out justice first. Lehane's characterizations are superb; each of the three main characters has demons to exorcise, and each must find his own way to reconcile the soft-focus past with the painful present.
Hollywood has to be the definitive setting for a mystery novel. Tinseltown has a history of decadence and debauchery rarely equaled since Roman times, plus an uncanny predisposition toward recording same on celluloid for posterity. Greed and Stuff, the latest from Jay S. Russell, chronicles the adventures of Marty Burns, private eye turned television star on (guess what . . . ) a mystery show. On Fox, yet. It would be nice to say that his sleuthing skills had prepared him for the role, but Marty is no Jim Rockford, onscreen or off. He does have a tendency for sniffing out trouble, however, and he knows the juicy gossip on everyone in Hollywood. Russell peppers his prose with insider anecdotes about real-life Hollywood personalities; there is a hilarious vignette of parking lot road rage featuring Calista Flockhart, TV's Ally McBeal. Greed and Stuff is a tongue-in-cheek, laugh-a-minute voyeuristic peep into America's favorite scandal site.
Copyright 2001 BookPage Reviews
- Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2000 December #2
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 Devineand 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 tobe 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.$250,000 ad/promo; author tour Copyright 2000 Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2000 December #1
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. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/00.] Craig Shufelt, Gladwin Cty. Lib., MI Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2000 December #1
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. Agent, Ann Rittenberg. (Feb. 6) Forecast: Given the excitement in-house at Morrow that this is Lehane's breakthrough book, and the promotion they're placing behind it, it stands an excellent chance of leaping straight onto the bestseller lists. A one-day laydown, $250,000 ad-promo and an 11-city author tour, plus a blurb from Michael Connelly designating Lehane as "the heir apparent," should provide the groundwork for explosive sales. Rights have been sold in the U.K., France and Germany, and there will be a large-print edition as well as an audio from Harper Audio. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
