Weekly Reader: Mystic River by Dennis Lehane; A Thought Provoking Thriller About The Effects on Crime Towards Three Friends

Weekly Reader: Mystic River by Dennis Lehane; A Thought Provoking Thriller About The Effects on Crime Towards Three Friends

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews




Spoilers: There are some mysteries and thrillers that are whodunnits: A murder where the characters have to learn who killed the victim. There are some that are whydunnits: Where the killer is known, at least by the Reader, so we learn how the crime happened and what motivated them to commit the murder. Then there's what I call, for lack of a better word, whatdunnits: In which a violent crime occurred, but the emphasis is on the grieving family members and friends as if saying “ Someone's dead. What are you going to do about it?”

The Oscar winning film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is one example. In it a grief stricken mother, orders three billboards to place outside her home posting damming messages against the Sheriff for not solving her daughter's murder. While the movie hinted at a potential killer, the daughter's murder is never truly resolved. It becomes a story less about solving the crime than it is about a mother dealing with her grief, succumbing to near insanity, and ultimately coping with the fact that she may never learn who killed her.




Mystic River by Dennis Lehane is another example of a whatdunnit. While there is a murder and the killer is identified in the end, the emphasis is the impact of the murder on three men and their families.




The three men: Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle grew up together in the same neighborhood though Sean grew up on the rich side and Jimmy and Dave on the poor. Sean and Jimmy became friends because their fathers worked together. Dave often just tagged along with the other two.




Two important events shaped the trio’s lives. The first occurred when they were 11 years old. A pair of strangers offer the boys a ride in their car. Sean and Jimmy refuse but Dave hops inside only to be missing for four days. He returns to much fame and notoriety and a fearful disturbing personality that haunts him for the rest of his life.




The second event occurs later when they are adults. Katie Marcus, Jimmy's beloved eldest daughter goes missing after making plans to elope with her boyfriend. After a few days of tense searching, Sean Devine now a State Homicide Police Detective finds the girl shot, beaten, and brutally murdered.




Katie's death sends the three men into downward spirals as they question their lives. Sean tries to solve this case using legal and investigative means to learn who killed Katie while coming to terms in his career and marriage.

He has just returned from suspension and is separated from his wife, Lauren because he doubts that he’s the father of their daughter. He is determined to solve Katie's murder to find some sense of order in his life amidst the random chaos of a faltering marriage and the seemingly senseless murder of a young girl.




Jimmy, Katie's father, has the most emotional journey in the novel. While he is trying to retain a strong front for his younger daughters and his second wife, Annabeth (his first wife, Katie's mother died a long time ago), he is willing to give into his past reputation to resolve Katie's death. He was a delinquent as a teenager and served time in early adulthood. Though he owns and manages a convenience store, he hasn't left his illegal past behind. Instead he embraces vigilantism as he and his brothers-in-law use violent means to resolve the murder.

In one chilling passage, he is so filled with rage at a potential suspect that he kills him without any thought only to discover later that he was the wrong person. Though he is so far gone in his anger and desire for revenge that he justifies his kill as saying the other man was “probably” up to something and would have eventually become a killer.




If Jimmy had the most emotional journey and Sean had the most procedural, then Dave’s is probably the creepiest. He still suffers from nightmares about his abduction as a child and the molestation he endured from his kidnappers. He thinks of that time as something that happened to someone else to “The Boy Who Escaped The Wolves.” He seems to have Dissociative Identity Disorder separating that kid from his current life as a businessman and family man.

He separates those two lives until the night before Katie's disappearance, he comes home covered in blood. He tells his wife that he fought a mugger outside the neighborhood bar. Celeste begins to doubt his story especially after she hears reports about Katie Marcus's murder on the news. Did the loving and seemingly meek man she shared a bed with and fathered her son brutally kill an innocent girl? As for Dave, he has to come to terms with his earlier kidnapping and molestation to understand his later actions and the actions of “The Boy Who Escaped from Wolves.”




While the murder is solved, it comes out from nowhere to the point that this Reader wonders if Lehane didn't intend for the resolution to be important. The most important aspects of the novel are how a young woman's violent murder affects her vengeful father and his friends, one who is trying to rebuild a new life and the other still suffering from the scars of the past.