Mystic River

By Dennis Lehane

William Morrow; $25; 0-688-16316-5; February, 2001; 401 pages

      Dennis Lehane's five superb crime novels, beginning with the stunning 1994 "A Drink Before the War", and all featuring the undeniably captivating Boston working class detectives Angie and Patrick, represent some of the finest work in the genre.
      In "Mystic River," a departure from his series, Lehane returns to the mean streets of his previous stories with a crackling hard boiled study of three childhood friends who never manage to transcend the boundaries of their class and upbringing.
      The book begins in 1975 as three restless boys are ambling around the neighborhood one morning, looking for adventure. Jimmy, the ring leader, is a reckless and mouthy kid, while Sean, whose father is Jimmy's father's supervisor at a candy plant, is more cautious and thoughtful. The trio is rounded out by misfit Dave, a tag-along sort whose presence the other two boys merely tolerate. A car with two men inside pulls up alongside the boys and after representing themselves as police, they convince Dave to get in the car and drive off. "Even if they find him alive," says Jimmy's father, "the kid's damaged goods. Never be the same." After four days, Dave does return, having escaped his captors. Everyone is thrilled at his return in the moment, but within days, Dave is miserably teased and ostracized at school, and his circle of friends vanishes.
      The story then shifts to present day. Dave is married with a small child, Jimmy has predictably led a criminal life, married to his second wife with a 19 year old daughter, Katie, by his first wife who died while Jimmy was doing time for burglary. Sean, now a homicide detective is painfully estranged from his wife. The men all see each other on occasion but are not friends as adults. One night, on the eve of her elopement with a local boy, Katie goes out for drinks with her girlfriends and is later found murdered at the local drive-in.
      The case is assigned to Sean. From this point on, Lehane weaves the relationships between the adults Dave, Jimmy and Sean into a disturbing tapestry of deceit, repressed memories and sharp violence. Each of the men carries burdens from their past. Jimmy still operates on the criminal fringe and Dave must keep the demons of his childhood experience at bay. Sean is reeling from his wife's infidelity and submerges himself in the ensuing investigation.
      Mystic River can be read with deep satisfaction simply as a first rate detective story. Lehane juggles the limited number of suspects with aplomb and draws a surrounding cast of characters with his typical insight and empathy. As the case unfolds, hidden motives and the indelible links between the three men become slowly apparent.
      All of Lehane's work deals with the human capacity for evil and an acknowledgment of the role one's environment plays in shaping life and personality. The larger theme here is an incisive, downright devastating indictment of the degree of territorial xenophobia in the tightly knit rough and tumble blue collar neighborhoods where the story is set. Near the novel's conclusion, Sean reflects on the closeness of the Irish immigrant community. "...they streamed into the city for jobs, but always back here when the day closed. You came back here because you'd built this village, you knew its dangers and its pleasures, and most important, nothing that happened here surprised you. There was a logic to the corruption and the bloodbaths and the bar fights and the stickball games and the Saturday-morning lovemaking. No one else saw the logic and that was the point. No one else was welcome here."
      Lehane's ability to construct this effective and compelling parable about the sometimes vicious constraints a lack of diversity and tolerance foster makes Mystic River a moving and memorable novel.