Just turned the last page on Dennis Lehane's Mystic River on the train home yesterday. After TIVOing the movie off of HBO last month, I figured I owed it to myself (and the movie) to read the source material first. I hope the movie ends up being less of a disappointment than the book did for me because, frankly, I was underwhelmed.

All the requisite ingredients for a good story are there: An emotionally charged story dealing with controversial topics, a murder mystery that kept me guessing until the end (more on that in a bit), and flawed characters you could relate to, all backed up by some above-average writing from Lehane; who once again deftly works in finely tuned human observations into normally mundane police procedurals.

So why didn't Mystic River work for me? The easy answer is the ending, which I found wholly unsatisfying. I won't give it away, but the whodunit revelation towards the end of the book came completely out of nowhere for me and felt forced on Lehane's part, as if pulled from the fictional ether. But more than that, the tone of the book seemed to be too restrained for its own good, too cold and distant to properly lend dramatic weight to the terrible circumstances some of the characters have endured through their lives.

In fact, as a side effect of this criticism, I'm actually expecting the film adaptation of Mystic River to be more successful than the book--simply because of the stellar cast. I've never known Sean Penn to pass up an opportunity to put his considerable emotional range in full view and I don't expect his Oscar-winning work in this film to be any different. I'll report back here, once I've seen the movie...