""There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected."" When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled tip to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever.Twenty-five years later, Sean Devine is a homicide detective. Jimmy Marcus is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave Boyle is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay demons that urge him to do terrible things.When Jimmy Marcus's daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine is assigned to the case. His personal life unraveling, he must go back into a world he thought he'd left behind to confront not only the violence, of the present but the nightmares of his past. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy Marcus, who finds that his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave Boyle, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered with someone else's blood.While Sean Devine attempts to use the law to return peace and order to the neighborhood, Jimmy Marcus finds his need for vengeance pushing him ever closer to a moral abyss from which lie wont be able to return, and Dave's wife, Celeste, sleeps at night with a man she fears may very well be a monster. a monster who fathered her child and hides his true nature from everyone, possibly even himself.A tense and unnerving psychological thriller, "Mystic River" is also an epic novel of love and loyalty, faith and family, in which people irrevocably marked by the past find themselves on a collision course with the darkest truths of their own hidden selves.

丹尼斯·勒翰,美國當代著名作傢。1966年齣生於多徹斯特。曾獲得美國安東尼最佳創作奬、貝瑞小說奬、馬薩諸塞最佳小說奬等多項大奬。

2001年完成的《神秘河》，被認為是他最具代錶作的佳作。小說以縱橫韆裏的筆力、層齣不窮的懸念、目不暇接的緊張情節，將一齣凶殺案的縱深脈絡淋灕盡緻地展現齣來。作品剛一齣版，文學界好評如潮，《齣版傢周刊》評價本書“已經站在神秘小說的最高峰”，本書也立即登上各大暢銷書榜前列。2003年，小說由美國著名導演剋林特·伊斯特伍德改編成同名電影，一舉獲得2004年奧斯卡金像奬六項提名、兩項大奬。