William Morrow and Co. 2001
Brazil: Companhia das Letras
Mainland China: ThinKingdom Media Group
Denmark: Lindhardt & Ringhof
Finland: Tammi
France: Editions Rivages
Germany: Diogenes
Greece: Harlenic Hellas
Hungary: Agave Konyvek Kft.
Indonesia: PT Bentang Pustake
Italy: Longanesi
Israel: Kinneret Publishing
Japan: Hayakawa Shobo
Korea: Goldenbough
Netherlands: ECI / The House of Books
Norway: J.W. Cappelens Forlag
Poland: Proszynski I Ska
Portugal: Sextante
Romania: Litera International
Russia: Atticus
Serbia: Alfa-Narodna Knjiga
Spain: Ediciones Salamandra
Sweden: Albert Bonniers Forlag
Taiwan: Faces
Turkey: Pegasus Yayinlari
Ukraine: Family Leisure Club
United Kingdom: Transworld
Vietnam: Nha Nam
Audio
Film
Clint Eastwood / Warner Brothers
Awards
Anthony Award for Best Novel, 2002
Barry Award for Best Novel, 2002
Independent Mystery Booksellers Association Dilys Award for Best Novel of the Year, 2002
Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction, 2002
Prix Mystère de la Critique, 2003
Prix des Libraires (Quebec), 2003
vDashiell Hammett Award finalist, 2002PEN/Winship Award finalist, 2001
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Mystic River
When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into 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 is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay — demons that urge him to do terrible things. When Jimmy's daughter is found murdered, Sean is assigned to the case. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy, who finds his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered in someone else's blood.
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.
Elmore Leonard:
Get Dennis Lehane's Mystic River. Boy does he know how to write.
Stephen King:
The superb detective novels of Dennis Lehane became a kind of lifeline for me.
The New York Times:
Among contemporary thrillers, there's no better reason than Mystic River to stay home with a good book. [It's] terrific: soulful, atmospheric, suspenseful and propelled by deep, wrenching emotions ... a beautifully nuanced story that is destined to be actors' catnip. The author draws even his story's incidental figures as sharply as he draws its major ones, with mesmerizing results.
The New York Times Book Review:
[A] powerhouse of a crime novel. Lehane spares nothing in his wrenching descriptions of how a crime in the neighbiorhood kills the neighborhood, taking it down house by house, family by family.
People:
[Mystic River is] pitch-perfect, the suspense and pacing impeccable. Combining the tension of a thriller with the dramatic inevitability of Greek tragedy, [it] ranks as a high-water mark for an author who is navigating his way to literary stardom. A shattering, suspenseful novel of love and betrayal.
Newsweek:
Nobody does it better than [Lehane]. He's got near-perfect pitch ... Mystic Riveris his best book by far. Like all his writing, it shimmers with great dialogue and a complex view of the world. -- Malcolm Jones
CNN:
It is a rare crime novelist who uses a murder mystery to plumb the deeper mysteries of the human soul. Dennis Lehane proves that he is a rare crime novelist with Mystic River. Cloaked by the trappings of a police procedural, the book is a hauntingly compelling examination of the lies we tell ourselves in order to hide our miseries from ourselves.
Publishers Weekly (starred review):
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. Lehane's story slams the reader with uncomfortable images, a beautifully rendered setting and an unnerving finale.
Library Journal (starred review):
Lehane once again proves himself nonpareil in writing about the dark side of the human character. Another winner.
Booklist (starred review):
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. 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.
Kirkus Reviews:
A spellbinding tale. A powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters' heads.
Esquire:
[Dennis Lehane is one of] the very best young mystery writers.
Tampa Tribune:
The journey to the unsettling conclusion is as gripping as it is dark, as hard to take as it is impossible to put down.
The Boston Herald:
A heartbreaker.
Boston Magazine:
Dennis Lehane might be the best mystery writer we have in this country today.
Orlando Sentinel:
Heartbreaking. Like Bruce Springsteen's song 'The River,' Lehane's Mystic River looks back at what might have been, the ways in which the past impinges on the present. And like the song, you can't get it out of your head. Springsteen's narrator says, "Now those memories come back to haunt me/ They haunt me like a curse/ Is a dream a lie if it don't come true/ Or is it something worse?"
New York Post:
[Lehane is] a mystery master...a tense, insightful whodunit...haunting.