Small Mercies: A Detective Mystery

Nothing prepared me for an antihero like middle-aged mother Mary Pat Fennessy in Lehane’s electrifying and turbulent new novel. Lehane put Southie (the mostly Irish part of South Boston) on the literary map in his early crime novels, and in SMALL MERCIES he achieves the pinnacle of his career. You are about to go on one of the wildest rides of your life (sometimes in a car named Bess)! Mary Pat is “built for battle” and will defend her turf and her family with relentless fury.

It’s 1974. It was a hot, steaming, rainless summer in Boston, and temps were high not only in the skies but on the ground, between the white Southies and the Black citizens of Roxbury, both districts under a busing mandate to bring Black students to the all-white South Boston High School, and white students to mostly Black Roxbury. Forget the PC talk, and don’t expect Mary Pat to be the exceptional white woman who embraces desegregation. In fact, she demonstrates her own roots of being brought up by what we would now call racists. The entire South Boston population was on the verge of violence in these weeks before the first day of school.

Something had to give, but was forced busing the answer? Lehane bravely tells a story of the racial divide, without sentimentality, without fear, and with an unstoppable plot. This is an unputdownable novel, not for the faint of heart. Prepare for graphic violence and plenty of moral ambiguity, as Lehane explores this time in history through the eyes of mostly the Southies, Mary Pat as the primary character. It’s the eve of protests, rallies, and riots, and Lehane flawlessly weaves in true pieces of history with his period piece.

No need to cover the plot—that’s for the reader to enjoy as the pages turn. Mary Pat lost a son to an OD after surviving Vietnam. Her daughter, Jules, is seventeen and will be one of the bused students when school begins. Mary Pat has lived in Southie her entire life, she is a solid citizen of the community. Southie is guarded and run by the Irish mob (think Whitey Bulger)—the Butler crew, known as “Southie’s protector.” They will protect you, but you have to submit to their code, their ethos.

This story gets explosive when Mary Pat collides with the mobster crew, while the busing mandate looms in the backdrop. She needs them to help her find her daughter, who failed to come home on a Saturday night. On the same night, a young Black man is found dead on the train tracks of a subway platform. The mob crew want to control Mary Pat’s actions, have her play by their rules, and let me tell you, you don’t want to get on Mary Pat’s bad side, either.

The detective on the case, Bobbie Coyne, is trying to help Mary Pat. He refers to her as broken, but unbreakable. He knows her kind—the fierce Southie woman--but also recognizes that she is unknowable. She is as gritty as this tale, as raw as this story. Recently divorced from her second husband, she takes no prisoners in her quest to find Jules, and she’s scared of nobody.

Racial conflicts, class clashes, and a gripping crime. Lehane spares no bigoted racial slur for the reader in these pages. There were times I could barely stomach these words, but Lehane is from Dorchester, and he knows the genuine language of the time and place. Mary Pat does recognize that her racism is inherited, that there is no “factual” basis for it, except that her parents passed it down to her, and in Southie, it is generational. The language here is not gratuitous, but it doesn’t go down easy. The story peeks at redemption, and Mary Pat nearly vibrates off the page. Once you start, you’re hooked. It’s heroin for readers.

Been some whiles since I last read a Lehane novel. Wasn't at all sure that I would finish this one at first, but then the writing was so good that I simply had to continue.

Not an uplifting read but a darn good one. Boston, mid-1970s, drugs and crime, to which desegration is added to make quite the powder keg. We experience it all through the eyes of Mary Pat, a denizen of South Boston and an Irish brawler in her own right. What a character study is Mary Pat, to whom her battered old station wagon Bess can hold only the faintest of candles. In a weird way, the ending was fulfilling if decidedly not a HEA.