ミスティック・リバー (ハヤカワ・ミステリ文庫) [文庫]

   デニス・ルヘインは、なんて残酷な創造主であろう。過酷な運命を課しておいて、それでも幸福を求めて抗おうとする人物を描こうとする。やるせない哀しみの中に、しかし、どこか優しさが宿ってもいる。これは並の小説ではない。

   25年前、11歳だったショーン、ジミー、デイヴは、遊び友だちでいながらも、互いに住む世界が違うことを感じていた。3人が路上でケンカしはじめたとき、ちぐはぐな友情を完全に終わらせ、かつまた生涯にわたって彼らを縛り続けることになる事件が起きる。警官を装った2人組の男が、ショーンと殴り合っていたデイヴを車で連れ去ったのだ。4日後、デイヴは自力で脱出を遂げ、帰還する。しかし、人々はデイヴを好奇の目でさげすみながら避けるようになる。デイヴは男たちに何をされたのか。大人たちは口を閉ざし、物語もそれを描写しない。

   25年が経ち、不幸な運命が再び3人を出会わせる。ジミーの最愛の娘、ケイティが惨殺されたのだ。警察官となったショーンがこの事件の担当になった。そしてケイティが最後に寄った店にはデイヴがいた。

   登場人物のそれぞれの視点で語られる物語が真相を先送りにし、最後まで緊張の糸は緩まない。それにしてもこの読後感はなんであろう。静かにぬめるように流れるミスティック・リバーが、心の闇によどみを作って離れない。忘れられない1冊。（木村朗子） --このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up in their street. One boy got in the car, two did not, and something terrible happened - something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys for ever. Paperback: ISBN 0593044762. --このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

境遇を越えて友情を育んできた、ショーン、ジミー、デイヴ。だが、十一歳のある日、デイヴが警官らしき男たちにさらわれた時、少年時代は終わりをつげた。四日後、デイヴは戻ってきたが、何をされたのかは誰の目にも明らかだった。それから二十五年後、ジミーの十九歳の娘が惨殺された。事件を担当するのは刑事となったショーン。そして捜査線上にはデイヴの名が…少年時代を懐かしむすべての大人たちに捧げる感動のミステリ。

若い女性の非業の死。被害者の父、担当刑事、疑われた男。3人は、かつて少年時代の友人だった。3人の運命が再び交差した時、新たな悲劇の幕はすでに上がっていた…。 --このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

Ever since blasting onto the literary scene with the Shamus Award-winning A 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 River is 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
--このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。

Dennis Lehane's Mystic River takes the material of the ordinary police procedural thriller and shapes it into heart-break. As boys, Jimmy, Dave and Sean were friends, until one day Dave was abducted by two men pretending to be cops, and was never quite the same again. As men, Dave is a damaged fantasist, safe in a quietly happy marriage; Jimmy a retired criminal making a good respectable living for the sake of his children; and Sean is the homicide cop who finds himself investigating the murder of Jimmy's eldest daughter Katie. This is not just a book about what becomes of the children who grow into adults; it is about what happens to a neighbourhood when the rules change, when an old established working-class district acquires gentrified espresso bars at one end and the beats of the city's most dangerous whores at the other. It is also a book about the tragedy of all sudden violent deaths; we never forget our sense of Katie as she was, dancing on the last night of her life--she is never just the corpse here, never just the object of mourning and investigation. --Roz Kaveney --このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

Lehane ventures beyond his acclaimed private eye series with this emotionally wrenching crime drama about the effects of a savage killing on a tightly knit, blue-collar Boston neighborhood. Written with a sensitivity toward character that exceeds his previous efforts, the story tracks the friendship of three boys from a defining moment in their childhood, when 11-year-old Dave Boyle was abducted off the streets of East Buckingham and sexually molested by two men before managing to escape. Boyle, Jimmy Marcus and Sean Devine grow apart as the years pass, but a quarter century later they are thrust back together when Marcus's 19-year-old daughter, Katie, is murdered in a local park. Marcus, a reformed master thief turned family man, goes through a period of intense grief, followed by a thirst for revenge. Devine, now a homicide cop assigned to the murder, tries to control his old friend while working to make sense of the baffling case, which involves turning over the past as much as it does sifting through new evidence. In time, Devine begins to suspect Boyle, a man of many ghoulish secrets who has led a double life ever since the molestation. Lehane's story slams the reader with uncomfortable images, a beautifully rendered setting and an unnerving finale. With his sixth novel, the author has replaced the graphic descriptions of crime and violence found in his Patrick Kenzie-Angela Gennaro series (Prayers for Rain; Gone, Baby, Gone) with a more pensive, inward view of life's dark corners. It's a change that garners his themesAregret over life choices, the psychological imprints of childhood, personal and professional compromiseAa richer context and his characters a deeper exploration. Agent, Ann Rittenberg. (Feb. 6) Forecast: Given the excitement in-house at Morrow that this is Lehane's breakthrough book, and the promotion they're placing behind it, it stands an excellent chance of leaping straight onto the bestseller lists. A one-day laydown, $250,000 ad-promo and an 11-city author tour, plus a blurb from Michael Connelly designating Lehane as "the heir apparent," should provide the groundwork for explosive sales. Rights have been sold in the U.K., France and Germany, and there will be a large-print edition as well as an audio from Harper Audio.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --このテキストは、 ハードカバー 版に関連付けられています。

When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up 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 is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay -- demons that urge him to do terrible things. When Jimmy's daughter is found murdered, Sean is assigned to the case. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy, who finds his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered in someone else's blood.

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.

--このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。

11 1.5-hour cassettes
--このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

Dennis Lehane is the author of nine novels—including the New York Times bestsellers Moonlight Mile; Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; and The Given Day—as well as Coronado, a collection of short stories and a play. He and his wife, Angie, divide their time between Boston and the Gulf Coast of Florida.

--このテキストは、 ペーパーバック 版に関連付けられています。

ルヘイン,デニス
マサチューセッツ州ドーチェスター生まれ。1994年に『スコッチに涙を託して』で作家デビューをし、ジェイマス賞新人賞を受賞した。2001年に発表した『ミスティック・リバー』はアンソニー賞を受賞し、全米ベストセラーに名をつらねた。日本でもミステリ・ランキングの上位に輝いている。2003年には『シャッター・アイランド』を発表し、新境地をひらいた

加賀山 卓朗
1962年生まれ、1985年東京大学法学部卒、英米文学翻訳家(本データはこの書籍が刊行された当時に掲載されていたものです)