Mystic River
A Novel
Readers rate it 4.2 (208 on Hardcover)
418 pages · Released Jan 30, 2001 · Harper Collins
Content report card
Mystic River parent’s guide: what’s inside
LGBTQ+ themes
What it offers
A note for parents
Mystic River is a dark, adult crime thriller centered on murder, trauma, and moral corruption—not appropriate for younger readers. The novel explores child abuse, psychological damage, and the descent into violence and vigilantism, with a protagonist whose sanity and morality are deeply compromised. While it offers some reflection on friendship and loyalty, the pervasive darkness, graphic content, and exploration of human depravity make this strictly adult fiction.
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From the publisher
"There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected." When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled tip to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened — something that ended their frien... "There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected." When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled tip 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 Devine is a homicide detective. Jimmy Marcus is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave Boyle is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay — demons that urge him to do terrible things. When Jimmy Marcus's daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine is assigned to the case. His personal life unraveling, he must go back into a world he thought he'd left behind to confront not only the violence, of the present but the nightmares of his past. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy Marcus, who finds that his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave Boyle, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered with someone else's blood. While Sean Devine attempts to use the law to return peace and order to the neighborhood, Jimmy Marcus finds his need for vengeance pushing him ever closer to a moral abyss from which lie wont be able to return, and Dave's wife, Celeste, sleeps at night with a man she fears may very well be a monster. a monster who fathered her child and hides his true nature from everyone, possibly even himself. 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.
Shelved under
- Fiction
- A mix driven
- Not Diverse Characters
- Strong Character Development
- Novel
- Favorite
- Loveable Characters
- Calibre Import
- Unloveable Characters
- Weak Character Development
- mysterious
- emotional
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ISBN 9780688163167 · Harper Collins