Mystic River

⚖The case for it

Three boys on one block, one of them taken by two men posing as police, and then twenty-five years. Lehane gives Jimmy and Sean and Dave enough interior life that a single afternoon in childhood keeps steering three separate adult men, and readers say “the author was an excellent creator of characters, especially damaged ones.” The “scene where Jimmy mourns his daughter” is the passage people name unprompted years later. The Flats and the Point are lived in rather than researched, and Annabeth and Celeste hold up differently under the same pressure. Readers say this is where “Lehane went from Good Thriller Writer to Great Writer.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The first third is “saturated with descriptions of absolutely everything,” long sentences doing scene-setting where readers want the case. A meaningful share report “I guessed who did it about halfway in,” which costs the back half its tension. The women exist to react, since “the women are pretty much kept on the sidelines.” Outside the three leads the cast are “archetypes, not breathing, hurting humans.” And when Lehane reaches for the big line readers wince, since “this author sucks at profundity and sentiment.” The framework that childhood damage produces adult violence strikes some readers as reductive.

— the honest librarian

10h

honest hours

14

sittings