SMALL MERCIES by Dennis Lehane

Mary Pat is a feisty, white “Southie broad,” to use her words, in 1974.  She has lived her entire life in the projects of South Boston, which now face the eruption of a racially-motivated conflict stemming from a judge’s order to bus white students to a predominantly Black school.  Then Mary Pat’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Jules, goes missing on the same night that a 20-year-old Black man is found dead in a subway station near where Jules was last seen.  Mary Pat has already lost her first husband to organized crime and her son to drugs, and Jules’s disappearance is the last straw.  She goes on the warpath, seeking out anyone who might have information on Jules’s whereabouts and becoming a volatile vigilante in the process.  She makes a series of shocking discoveries about her neighbors and about Jules but also about herself and how she has fomented hate and bigotry in her own daughter.  This is a gritty, visceral, violent tale of vengeance, but the unabashed hostile racism is what makes it hard to digest at times.  Dennis Lehane, I do hope this is not your last novel, because it is one of your best.  It is full of really striking observations, and there are a few moments that lighten up the dark nature of this book.  On page 234, we have this reflection from a cop: “Damn, Bobby thinks, if I’d met Mary Pat five years ago and she worked the street like this?  I’d have made lieutenant by now.”  No doubt.