Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/ “We bury our sins here. We wash them clean.” Mystic River was another selection of mine for the (already completed) Read to Reel challenge at my local library. Although I’ve owned this book for years, for whatever reason it remained on the “hysterectomy shelves” untouched until the librarian forced my hand. Amazingly, I have also been able to avoid ever seeing the movie that was released 10+ years ago due to my dislike for Clint Eas...

Rating: 5.0/5.0Genre:Mystery + ThrillerSynopsis:Three boys who are friends having a fight. A strange car pulls right there. One of the boys gets into the car, the two others don’t. Something bad happens that changes the three boys forever. After 25 years from this incident, a murder happens that connects all the three now men together. What happens next does not bring anything other than misery and sorrow.Book Structure:The book consists of four parts and 26 chapters over 401 pages. The story is...

Three young boys. Three young lives. A car with two scoundrels in the road. Silence.Many years later, a murder of someone's daughter. Life had a story to tell. Friendship broke out in different voices. I'm not going to say much about this book. An excellent, gritty, somber, literary, psycho-thriller. The murder mystery denied me more sleep! I wanted to cry for all of them. Still do. To Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle: - I can never forget, or give up on you. Friendship does not work th...

If one approaches “Mystic River” with the same mindset that one would approach a conventional “thriller”, one is apt to be a tad disappointed. Because what Dennis Lehane does here is to masterfully use the structure of the genre to explore deep psychological and moral issues.Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle are kids playing and growing up together in the small town of East Buckingham in the US. Sean, being from the blue collar neighbourhood of the Point, is socially a cut above Jimmy and...

“Jimmy knelt down by the river and plunged his hands in it, oily and polluted. . . We bury our sins here. We wash them clean.” I have now within a month listened to what I have heard from Goodreads friends are the three best novels from Dennis Lehane, Since We Fell, Shutter Island, and Mystic River. At this point, I have seen two film adaptations of his books that I liked very much, Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone. I haven’t read any of his other books (yet), but this one, based on a quick lo...

I’m picky with thrillers: I like them ambiguous, complicated and thought-provoking. It’s not enough to keep me on the edge of my couch cushion, turning the pages frantically; I want to feel the world and the characters’ reality as I work towards the dénouement. Everyone seems to love “Mystic River”, and I avoided it for a while because it is labeled as a thriller, and I was afraid it would be too ham-fisted for me. But I found a used copy at a thrift store and figured I didn’t have much to lose

I'm not sure why it took me so long to read this book, but now that I have, I want to see the film adaptation, too! It's an intense story from start to finish, told from different POVs, which worked really well to create suspense. This method also allowed Lehane to make each of the characters seem very fleshed out and real. You could feel Jimmy's anguish and Dave's confusion, and this made an almost exhausting read, because I got so sucked into the emotions of the characters. The story itself is...

Mystic River, Dennis LehaneMystic River is a novel by Dennis Lehane that was published in 2001. The Mystic River is not only a psychological, terrifying, and stressful novel, but also an epic one, describing love, loyalty, camaraderie, faith, and family. The story of this book is about people whose past has invariably affected their future, and who find themselves in dark situations, which exposes them to their inner and hidden selves.The novel revolves around three boys who grow up as friends i...

Every adult human being has the chance to choose a personally favored path of life (considering it isn't predeterminated by illnesses, accidents etc.), but the general direction this path heads towards will usually already be marked during childhood: This might be the idea which provoked Dennis Lehane to write about the abysms of humanity and the fateful consequences one single deed might release to weigh heavily upon your conscience for the rest of your life - even if it is something as simple

Once upon a time, three boys were fighting in the street when two men claiming to be plainclothes cops show up. One kid gets in the car, the others stay put, and their lives will never be the same. Decades later, Dave Boyle, the kid who got into the car, is accused of killing the daughter of Jimmy Marcus, one of the other boys, and the third boy has grown up to be Sean Devine, the cop in charge of the case. Did Boyle do it? And if he didn't, can Sean find the real killer?Yeah, 2013 was supposed

Intense, stunning, and shocking.And I always wanted to know what was going on in Jimmy's head after the last stunt that he pulled. Movies would never tell us that, and that's why books are always better...

I bought a hardback copy of Mystic River when it first came out, and I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know who has the slightest interest in crime fiction ever since. Oddly enough, it’s been almost 20 years since I first read the book, and I’d never revisited it until now. I love it, but there’s just so much Lehane-style depression that a fella can take.In a working class Boston neighborhood during the mid-‘70s,three young boys encounter a couple of child molesters pretending to be cops.

5★“Four in the morning, and she was more awake than she’d been in years. She was Christmas-morning-when-you’re-eight kind of awake. Her blood was caffeine. Your whole life, you wished for something like this. You told yourself you didn’t, but you did. To be involved in a drama.”The story isn’t about her, though, it’s about them, and she knows them. Jimmy, Sean, and Davey. The boys. They grew up together, from different parts of town. But at eleven, boys are rough and tumble, and who cares where

Just before picking this book up - my first Lehane (it won't be my last) - I came across a quote by him illuminating the working-class, blue-collar nature of noir: In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb. I love this quote. It slices right to the heart of who we are reading about, and even why we are reading about them. In Mystic River, Lehane is shooting from both barrels; he intuitively knows who he is writing about and where -- the gritty, depressed, w...

"I'm just saying there are threads, okay? Threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected."Mystic River is a great mystery, but it is so much more than that. It is a compelling plot-driven story with such well-written and fleshed out characters that it is pretty much just as equally a character-driven story. It is about consequences, family, friendship, and loyalty. Lehane's writing game is strong. Not a spoiler because the synopsis tells you that Jimmy's daughter is murder...

I thoroughly enjoyed this story from start to finish. Dennis Lehane did a great job of creating a suspenseful story centered around a dark atmosphere. The story was a suspense, crime, and mystery novel that was multilayered with haunting psychological ambiance. There were multiple lines crossed that included childhood friends and the associated loyalty that can linger as we become adults, loyalty to immediate family and friends as adults, alignment of one's personal code of values & beliefs, fai...

I read this masterpiece a while ago before I joined Goodreads and I've been contemplating posting a review because it's on the top of my favorites list. But for a while I wasn't sure I could say anything that could do justice to this remarkable book. Not only is it Dennis Lehane's greatest book (and that's saying a lot), this modern tragedy sets the standard for all contemporary crime dramas and thrillers. It's one of the only books that I would consider near perfect and I would recommend it to

Writing this review as I sit here watching Sean Penn discover the brutal death of his daughter, kicking myself once again because this is another book I should of read a long time ago. Just glad in a way that I also hadn't seen the film and blown a powerfully compelling ending that managed to stay just out of my grasp until two pages before the big reveal. Mystic River is a riveting character driven crime thriller about three boys, one abducted and forever scarred with what he endured, all grown...

Extremely well written. This author can do more for character development in one or two pages than others try in 30. There was not one moment of let down or disbelief. This is a very good, gritty, tough and tragic mystery. Has to be on a top 10 (of all time) list somewhere. ;-)

Three friends and the doomed power of injuries..A battered child choosing the lie in the face of death, because the truth is so enorm and monstrous he cannot uttered it..The evil commited to the soul of a child reverberates and mould the lives of other people.. Three friends..One of then, Dave is kinapped by two child molester for four days..After this, nothing is the same again!!!Decades latter:Dave has a young beatiful wife and a son..His wife loves him but know nothing what happened to his ma...