Mystic River

Very fast moving mystery/pyschological thriller (I read this in three sittings). I really liked the two marshall characters but the story was predictable. This author has written Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone which were turned into movies. If the movies are anything like this book, it would be a good summer popcorn movie.

Really liked it. Kept me turning pages and staying up late into the night reading it.

I think what I learned from this book, plus having seen two movies (Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone) based on Lehane's books, is that while I believe Lehane is an excellent writer, I really don't like his books all that much as they are just too dark for me. It's hard to describe a book like this without spoilers, suffice it to say that nothing is as it seems. It's set on an island in Boston Harbor in 1954, just as Hurricane Carol is bearing down on the New England coast. Martin Scorsese is making a film of this book, with the release date recently pushed back from October to February of 2010. I'm wondering how faithful it will be to the book's plot and even more, wondering if I really want to see it, even though some of the filming was done here in Maine at Acadia National Park. I wouldn't want to warn anyone off this book just because I didn't like it; it was very well done, just not my cup of tea.

This book was pretty strange. Even after reading it I wasn't entirely sure what had happened. Even though the twist was predictable it wasn't annoying and it worked very well with this story.

Dave, Sean and Jimmy where childhood friends, but things changed when Dave gets into a stranger’s car and the others don’t. Twenty five years later all three are completely differently people. Sean is a detective, Jimmy is an ex-convict and Dave is just a shell of a man; never quite recovering from the emotionally scarring events of his past. Their lives come together again when Jimmy’s daughter is found brutally murdered, Dave returns home covered in blood and Sean is put on the case to find who killed Jimmy’s daughter.

Mystic River is a psychological thriller that never really felt right. Not to take anything away from Dennis Lehane; while this is the first book of his that I’ve read I think he has the talent to write dark, noir-ish psychological thrillers but maybe this is a bad example of his ability. The book opens with the childhood and Dave being abducted by the child molester, which while a terrible thing to happen it didn’t feel like Lehane hit the mark with the attempt to be dark and disturbing with this situation. Then the book seemed to drag on and on until the book finally started to pick up pace about half way through.

When it comes to the crime, I found it rather weird that they would assign the case to someone that knows the victim’s father. Sure it was twenty five years ago but to me it still felt like a conflict. Sure I don’t know too much about police procedure but to me that just doesn’t seem right. Overall, this book didn’t feel dark enough, the writer did seem to make it a dark thriller but I felt like it never got there and fell more into the area of predictable. When I read a psychological thriller, I expect a complicated and twisted story and I don’t think I got it here.

The book was entertaining and I’m glad to have read it but it wasn’t something I would recommend anyone else read. I hope Dennis Lehane’s other books are a lot better because while I can see what Mystic River is trying to achieve I think it fell too short. I think the emotions within this novel were too flat and this was the overall problem. I’ve not seen the movie but I wonder if the tension and emotion worked within it since this adaptation was well received.