Mystic River - Denis Lehane

In 1975 a childhood friendship between three boys descends into a fistfight in the street. A car draws up and a man claiming to be a policeman gets out. One of the boys gets into the car, the other two do not. The car drives off; four days later the boy escapes and returns home. The friendship between the boys is over. Twenty five years on and the boys are grown up: one is a reformed criminal; one a detective; the one who went missing is now married and stuck in a succession of dead-end jobs. One night the daughter of the reformed criminal is murdered, and the now grown-up missing boy comes home covered in blood. The detective is assigned the case.

This is a novel about grief, friendship, masculinity, growing older, loss, family, deindustrialisation and what can and cannot be escaped from the past. But it doesn’t shout about it. It is a serious book about people marketed to appeal to the thriller fan. And it is thrilling: I read its 500-odd pages in a few days; if I’d been on holiday it would have been over even sooner. When I was about half way through and anticipating my feelings at the end of the novel, I worked out who I would need to buy this book for: I came up with about six or seven people that would just have to read it.

In the end, it did not quite live up to its enormous promise. This might be true for men of any generation, but fathers are sentimentalised at the expense of sons. Older males are stoic, admirable and possibly alcoholic: they are Men. Younger ones are shiftless, without honour and probably mixed up in drugs. There may too be a problem with the pacing - the built-up emotional punch does not hit quite as hard as I expected; and though the whodunit aspect was never overly important, it is resolved almost casually, and slightly unconvincingly.

But it was never really about who committed the murder, it is about the effects and reverberations of that death upon a community. It is a powerful, wrenching novel, disguised as an airport thriller – I won’t be buying it for you, but do yourself a favour: get it for yourself.