Far more than a good mystery...

Mystic River was recommended to me long before it went to film, and I've been hooked on Dennis LeHane ever since. His books are full of twists and turns and surprises. I just finished reading "Shutter Island", and I barely paused--I couldn't put it down. I don't want to spoil the plot with my choice of quotes, I just want to give you a pinch of the brilliance. Three paragraphs, from different parts of the novel...

"Everyone wants a quick fix. We're tired of being afraid, tired of being sad, tired of feeling overwhelmed, tired of feeling tired. We want the old days back, and we don't even remember them, and we want to push into the future, paradoxically, at top speed. Patience and forbearance become the first casualties of progress. This is not news. Not news at all. It's always been so."

"You surfaced without a history, then spent the blinks and the yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.
What was far crueler were the ways in which a seemingly illogical list of objects could trigger memories of his wife that lodged in his brain like a lit match."

"You was in all sorts of places, huh?"
Yeah, I was. Saw the world.
What'd you think of it?
Different languages, same shit.
Yeah, that's the truth, huh?"