Mystic River
Ever since blasting onto the literary scene with the Shamus Award-winningA Drink Before the War, Dennis Lehane has been the golden boy of noir. His Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro novels are marvels of tight pacing, dialogue so good it gets under your skin and stays there, with dead-on portrayals of working-class Boston neighborhoods. Sure, he's the oft-proclaimed, hard-boiled heir to Hammett and Chandler, but Lehane also takes a page from the Hemingway school of hyper-intense writing. He pares away and pares away until he's left with the absolute essentials--and then those essentials just explode off the page.In his five Kenzie-Gennaro novels, the detective duo is at the nexus of Lehane's  big bang. Darkly funny and just this side of jaded, Angie and Patrick move  through Dorchester's bleak streets with an assurance born of familiarity. It's  impossible to imagine these streets without the pair, or to imagine the pair  away from those streets.Mystic River, then, arrives as a bit of a  gamble, as Lehane moves from the sharp edges of portraiture to the broader  strokes of landscape. No Angie, no Patrick: this neighborhood is on its own.  It's not any prettier and certainly no friendlier, and its working-class  façade still barely masks the irresistible tug of violent ways, means,  and ends.Twenty-five years ago, Dave Boyle got into a car. When he came back four days  later, he was different in a way that destroyed his friendship with Sean Devine  and Jimmy Marcus. Now Sean's a cop, Jimmy's a store owner with a prison record  and mob connections, and Dave's trying hard to keep his demons safely submerged.  When Jimmy's daughter Katie is found murdered, each of the men must confront a  past that none is eager to acknowledge. Lehane tugs delicately on the strands  that weave this neighborhood together, testing for their strengths and  weaknesses; this novel seems as much anthropological case study as thriller.By turns violent and pensive,Mystic Riveris vintage Lehane. How good is  it? You may go in missing Angie and Patrick, but after a few pages you won't  even realize they're gone. Lehane's noir is still black magic.--Kelly  Flynn--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.