Rated 3/5
I'm not sure, precisely, what I expected from
Mystic River, but it was more than what I got. Lehane's tale of three boys separated by circumstances and then thrust back together in adulthood by tragedy pulls one along at a good clip, but with enough attention to detail and character so that the novel feels like more than just a crime thriller. This is sometimes almost a character study, and that, along with well-written sentences, make
Mystic River rise above its fellows within the genre. And yet. And yet, somehow, the book never seems to get anywhere. The characters behave precisely as you would expect them to, life in
Mystic River is exactly the dreary trudge it appears to be at first glance, every tragic outcome the reader foresees at the midpoint comes to its horrible inevitable fruition, and the resolution of the crimes is disappointingly predictable. Perhaps all this is somehow the point, but I was looking for some surprise, some revelation of an unexpected truth rather than a litany of downtrodden stereotypes marching toward a fate so apparently inevitable that one wonders why bother. In the second half of the novel, there were three or four points at which I thought to myself, "This is it,
this is where he's going to flip it and do something unexpected, tell me something new, get me in the gut with a blistering truth I should have seen coming but didn't because I was taken in by the stereotypes." But he never did. The masterful set-up, the attention to character, the above-average sentences--all that created a promise, and it was the promise that led to the disappointment. If one came to
Mystic River expecting just a police thriller, one would probably be pleasantly surprised to find it something a little more. I came to it expecting a lot more, and came away let down.