After Sean Penn won the Oscar for best actor, Tim Robbins for best actor in a supporting role and Clint Eastwood was nominated for best director, plus many more nominations for those involved in the filming, I knew I needed to watch this movie. And I eventually did, quite a few years ago. It was great.After that, I knew I would eventually read the novel. And I have. It is great. Hats off to Dennis Lehane, an author who can dodge and weave around his storyline, giving us his complex characters bi...

I wanted to start the year with a 5* rating and I am so happy to share this amazing dark novel with you. It is masterpiece as a mystery novel but also as pure literature. I’ve wanted to read Lehane since I’ve seen the amazing movie with Leo di Caprio, called Shutter Island. It is made after the book with the same name and I was sure that I would love the author’s writing, if the book was anything like the movie. I finally chose to start with his other most popular novel, which also got two movie...

"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...

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 ...

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...

“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...

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 ...

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 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. ...