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.,