In 1975 three young boys encounter a pair of roving child molesters who pass themselves off as policemen. Two of them escape, but ten-year-old Dave Boyle is not so fortunate and finds himself trapped in a four-day ordeal that changes his life forever. Mystic River is both a murder mystery and a novel of character. Like the very best fiction, it is, in the end, about many things: grief, sin, karma, hope and the lack of hope, and the countless ways in which past events continue to influence the present.