Here are several summaries, or notes , taken from prominent writers on story, style, scene, and structure. They are presented in comparison with commentary and application to several example cases studies from Lehane's Mystic River .

These study notes are provided as part of an intended Non-profit, educational, and scholarly effort of limited public distribution. Excerpts are a small proportion of the sourced original texts and readers are urged to use the available end note references to consult the original works, the excerpts are transformative in that they are provided together with comparative sources, novel, original analysis, commentary, and in application to the novel Mystic River.