book review of small mercies by dennis lehane

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Dennis Lehane’s Latest Depicts Boston’s Desegregation Battles

His novel “Small Mercies” takes place in the tumultuous months after a 1974 order to integrate the city’s schools through busing.

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SMALL MERCIES , by Dennis Lehane

In June 1974, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. declared that in order to end de facto racial segregation in Boston’s public schools, a percentage of students from predominantly Black high schools would be bused to predominantly white ones, and vice versa. The first phase of the program was to begin 12 weeks later in two of the city’s poorest neighborhoods — all-white South Boston and mostly Black Roxbury.

Protests broke out in South Boston. Parents there mobilized against the policy, vowing not to send their children to school in September if it went ahead. Tensions over desegregation have reverberated through Boston ever since.

That tumultuous summer provides the backdrop to Dennis Lehane’s excellent and unflinching new novel, “Small Mercies.” The book has all the hallmarks of Lehane at his best: a propulsive plot, a perfectly drawn cast of working-class Boston Irish characters, razor-sharp wit and a pervasive darkness through which occasional glimmers of hope peek out like snowdrops in early spring.

The protagonist, Mary Pat Fennessy, is a lifelong resident of one of Southie’s public housing projects. At 42, she works two jobs and still can’t make ends meet. Her first husband died young. Her son died of a drug overdose after returning from Vietnam. A second marriage unraveled. Her teenage daughter, Jules, is all she has left.

Then Jules goes missing. The night she disappears, a young Black man is found dead at a subway station in South Boston, an area so homogeneous in 1974 that the mere presence of a Black person there confounds everyone. A three-pronged mystery emerges: Where is Jules? What happened to the man in the station? And could the two events be related?

Mary Pat believes that much of life comes down to luck, and that their lack of it is what leads to a certain resignation in the people of Southie, her people, who traffic in well-worn refrains like “It is what it is” and “Whatta ya gonna do.”

The prospect of busing seems to bring out an underlying rage among them, aware as they are that those who shape the law aren’t often affected by their own decisions. Mary Pat knows that Judge Garrity lives in affluent, suburban Wellesley, where, she says, the children of the powerful will avoid busing just as they avoided the draft.

Mary Pat has been taught that the residents of Southie can count on only one another. But as her search for her daughter becomes increasingly desperate, she is met with silence from her community. She begins to question everything, especially the motivations of the local mobster Marty Butler and his crew, who claim to protect those in the neighborhood who pledge loyalty to them.

Ultimately, alone and with nothing left to lose, she is willing to fight anyone, confront anyone, even Butler himself, to uncover the truth. The take-no-prisoners hero of this novel is a pissed-off middle-aged mom and it is a thrill to watch her burn it all down.

There is a tendency on the part of some contemporary authors to exempt their main characters from the prejudices of time and place, to make them more enlightened than they likely would have been. Lehane resists this. Mary Pat’s thoughts and use of racial slurs are painful to read at times. They also feel entirely true to who she is. Hatred and racism, Lehane indicates, are cycles passed on from one generation to the next, not unlike the physical violence that permeates the lives of Mary Pat and everyone she knows. She is a victim of this, as well as a perpetrator. She has handed her inherited biases down to her children with devastating consequences.

As the story progresses, she reckons deeply with this hate. Where does it come from? Why does she feel the way she does about the Black population of Roxbury, whose lives are suddenly intertwined with those of the people of South Boston? Lehane returns again and again to the idea that more unites these two disenfranchised populations than divides them, even if they refuse to see it.

Throughout the novel, real people and events make cameos, like Louise Day Hicks, who led the antibusing group Restore Our Alienated Rights, or ROAR. (Mary Pat is a member of a fictional sister group called SWAB.) Characters show up to the antibusing rally at Boston City Hall, where a furious crowd spits on Senator Ted Kennedy, and curses him offstage. They cross paths with the angry mob who famously strung up and burned effigies of Garrity and Kennedy on the streets of South Boston.

Marty Butler is, of course, a thinly veiled stand-in for Whitey Bulger. Like Bulger, Butler is fiercely antibusing. In the first chapter, one of his men goes door to door handing out signs for an upcoming protest. One of the more fascinating aspects of the novel is its powerful indictment of the damage done by the Irish mob in Southie, who fomented hate and xenophobia in an effort to keep the community dependent on them and to keep outsiders away.

On the first day of school at South Boston High in 1974, police officers in riot gear lined the streets. Protesters shouted racist epithets. Some threw bricks at the windows of school buses carrying students arriving from Roxbury. Not a single white student showed up to Southie High that day. The boycott was meant to put an immediate end to busing, but in fact, the policy continued until 2013 .

Michael Patrick MacDonald, whose memoir “ All Souls ” chronicles his upbringing in a South Boston housing project in the 1970s, argued in a 2014 essay that in the end, busing benefited Whitey Bulger more than anyone.

In 1981-82, MacDonald points out, South Boston High had the worst attendance rate of any public high school in America. Throughout the 1990s, South Boston’s white public school students had the city’s highest dropout rate.

“Busing gave Whitey a large population of poor, unemployed teenage dropouts, a lucrative market for the drugs he brought in, and a source of recruitment for all the Southie-based criminal enterprises that brought Whitey a cut,” MacDonald writes.

“Small Mercies” foreshadows all of this. Lehane masterfully conveys how the past shapes the present, lingering even after the players are gone.

J. Courtney Sullivan’s most recent novel is “Friends and Strangers.”

SMALL MERCIES | By Dennis Lehane | 299 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $30

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Dennis Lehane’s masterful new novel revisits the terrain of ‘Mystic River’

In ‘small mercies,’ lehane takes readers back to racially tense 1970s boston, where a fearless mother searches for her missing daughter.

As I write this, Dennis Lehane’s masterful new novel, “ Small Mercie s,” still has me by the throat. Best known for “ Mystic River ” (2001) and “ Shutter Island ” (2003) — made into movies directed by Clint Eastwood and Martin Scorsese, respectively — Lehane is also the author of a mystery series featuring private eyes Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, as well as “ The Given Day ” (2008), a historical novel set in Boston at the end of World War I.

“Small Mercies” also takes place in bygone Boston. The year is 1974, President Richard Nixon has just resigned, a federal judge has ordered the busing of students to desegregate the city’s public high schools, and irate White parents are raising hell. Among them is Lehane’s protagonist, Mary Pat Fennessy, widowed by her first husband, divorced by her second and working as a hospital aide in what used to be called an “old folks’ home.” The story begins with a wrenching addition to Mary Pat’s quotient of personal losses: Her only surviving child, 17-year-old Jules (for Julie), fails to come home after a night out with friends, or the following day, or the day after that.

As a lifelong resident of Southie, a lower-middle-class Irish neighborhood where everybody knows everybody else’s business, Mary Pat assumes it won’t take her long to piece together what happened. Yet her inquiries get her almost nowhere, and the police don’t fare much better. Then comes a complication.

On the night of Jules’s disappearance, a young Black man was found dead on Southie subway tracks, his mangled body suggesting that a train ran over him. His mother and Mary Pat work at the same institution, but they can’t be of much help to each other in a city awash in racial tension, not even after it becomes clear that the two incidents are connected by way of the local Irish mob.

With time, Mary Pat’s suspicion that Jules is dead ripens into a certainty. Having nobody else to worry about and nothing to lose but her life (which means little to her now), Mary Pat resolves to take on the mob.

Dennis Lehane’s ‘Since We Fell’ takes us into the heart of a tormented woman

She has good qualifications: a strong physique, single-mindedness, obduracy. “She’s happiest when she’s opposed,” Lehane writes, “most ecstatic when she’s been wronged.” A lack of squeamishness serves her well, too. Lehane paints a gruesome scene in which the well-armed Mary Pat extracts a number of facts from Jules’s last known boyfriend, first by cutting into his scrotum with a knife, then by forcing him to shoot up some heroin, which brings on a euphoria conducive to truth-telling.

All this goes on in the context of spontaneous protests and organized demonstrations against busing, including a rally at which Sen. Ted Kennedy gets a rude comeuppance after urging acceptance of the mandate. Watching him get hustled away by “security guys,” Mary Pat “is baffled by the back of Teddy’s suit. It’s almost completely white now, as if he’s been s--- on by a flock of birds. It takes her a second to realize it isn’t bird s---. It’s spit. The crowd is spitting on a Kennedy.” The protesters score points by seizing on a weakness in the authorities’ position: Most of them send their children to private schools, which the busing order does not reach. The repeated use of racial slurs, however, undermines the dissidents’ cause.

Indeed, trash talk seems to be rampant among Mary Pat and her friends, but Lehane, who grew up in the ’70s in Dorchester, a neighborhood near Southie, introduces a nuance. “If you don’t know a woman,” Mary Pat reflects, “you don’t curse around her, even if she herself swears like a drunken trucker. It’s considered discourteous.”

Narrating mostly from Mary Pat’s point of view, Lehane has her skewer other characters while also calibrating her own place in the world. Here, for example, is her take on a White college dropout who deals drugs to pass the time until he inherits his uncles’ cement business. “For a kid from Southie, he speaks like some rich people she’s run into over the years — like his words and God’s come from the same well, while your words come from a place off the map that no one can hear or see.”

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If Lehane’s sociological precision gives “Small Mercies” a gravitas seldom found in crime novels, Mary Pat Fennessy, a “mother … built for battle,” enhances the effect. She is a 20th-century version of a Fury out of Greek mythology, and her one-woman war against the mob is a fearsome thing to behold.

Dennis Drabelle is a former contributing editor of Book World.

Small Mercies

By Dennis Lehane

Harper. 299 pp. $30

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A Dennis Lehane Novel Investigates Boston’s White Race Riots

By Laura Miller

For the crime novelist Dennis Lehane, southern Boston is a muse, but for his characters it’s more of a curse. Lehane grew up in Dorchester, the setting for his series of books featuring Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, private detectives whose roots in the neighborhood help them solve cases. The best known of those books, “ Gone, Baby, Gone ” (1998), was adapted for the screen by Ben Affleck in 2007. Kenzie and Gennaro know the local hoods and toughs because they went to school with them. When the pair need muscle, they call on their sociopathic and improbably loyal buddy, Bubba Rogowski, also a former classmate, who sells illegal weapons, lives in a warehouse surrounded by booby traps, and comically terrifies everyone else.

But series fiction, in which our detectives must survive to investigate another day, can’t fully realize Lehane’s tragic vision of Boston’s working-class enclaves. It is his stand-alone novels—especially “ Mystic River ,” which appeared in 2001 and was made into a movie two years later by Clint Eastwood, and his most recent, “ Small Mercies ” (Harper)—that land like a fist to the solar plexus. They, too, are full of booby traps, but the metaphorical kind that blow up futures instead of limbs: negligent parents, busted marriages, dead-end jobs, booze, poverty, violence, resentment, and misdirected hate.

As Mary Pat Fennessy, the central character of “Small Mercies,” sees it, the people in her neighborhood are poor not because “they don’t try hard, don’t work hard, aren’t deserving of better things” but because “there’s a limited amount of good luck in this world, and they’ve never been given any.” At forty-two, with two husbands in the rearview mirror and a son who died of a heroin overdose, Mary Pat looks as if she “came off a conveyor belt for tough Irish broads.” A drinker but not a drunk, she works two jobs, which is still not enough to keep the gas company from cutting off service to the apartment she shares with her much loved seventeen-year-old daughter, Jules.

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Mary Pat and Jules live in a housing project in South Boston—Southie, which you don’t want to conflate with nearby Dorchester when anyone from Boston is around. The novel, set half a century ago, has a character, a police detective named Bobby Coyne, who hails from a neighborhood in nearby Dorchester which was as white and Irish and working-class as Southie. He marvels that, despite all these similarities, crossing over to Southie makes him feel that he’s “just entered the rain forest of an unknowable tribe.” He’s never seen more people helping little old ladies to cross streets or to carry groceries. The neighbors all know one another, pride themselves on rallying to shovel snow from the sidewalks and uncover cars after a blizzard. “They’re the friendliest people he’s ever met,” Lehane writes. “Until they aren’t. At which point they’ll run over their own grandmothers to ram your fucking skull through a brick wall.”

The Southie of “Small Mercies” isn’t the gentrifying Southie of today. Lehane’s contemporary characters often fume about the “yuppies” taking over their neighborhoods, the gastropubs and fancy coffee shops supplanting the dive bars and pot-roast-scented taverns. But the novel takes place in the summer of 1974, when Southie made national headlines for rising up against the court-ordered desegregation of its public schools. In an author’s note, Lehane recalls the night his father took a wrong turn driving his family home and ran into an anti-busing protest. Ted Kennedy and the judge who’d ordered the desegregation were being burned in effigy, and the furious crowd rocked the Lehanes’ Chevy. “I’d never been so terrified in my life,” Lehane writes.

“Small Mercies” opens with Mary Pat receiving a visit from a representative of the local gang leader. A man with “eyes the color of Windex,” he’s one of those clean-cut, pseudo-civic-minded mobsters whose shakedowns come in the guise of requests for donations to the I.R.A. This time, however, his minion has a stack of leaflets for Mary Pat to distribute and some picket signs that need assembling. Even the criminals in Southie are mobilizing to protest the busing of Black children into the neighborhood’s schools and of local kids into the almost all-Black schools of Roxbury and Mattapan. Mary Pat herself is all in on the demonstration, outraged that Jules is “being forced—by federal edict—to enter a new school her senior year in a foreign neighborhood not known for letting white kids walk around after sundown.” She worries that Jules is too fragile for the neighborhood she already lives in. As Mary Pat’s mother used to say, “You’re either a fighter or a runner. And runners always run out of road.”

Mary Pat doesn’t think of herself as a racist. She scolded her kids for using racial slurs when referring to those “good, hardworking, upstanding Negroes” who simply “want the same things she wants.” She’s friendly with a Black co-worker at the nursing home where she has a job as an aide, although she admits that it’s never going to be the kind of friendship in which they’d exchange phone numbers. She tells herself that she’d be just as angry if the court had ordered her kid to take a crosstown bus ride to an all-white school, despite a nagging voice in the back of her mind that insists this isn’t really true. Then Jules goes missing on the night before a twenty-year-old Black man is found dead under a subway platform near Southie, and Mary Pat embarks on a quest to find out what happened—a quest that will compel her to listen more attentively to that internal voice.

In a detective story, the mystery both propels the plot and gives the sleuth license to venture into places and milieus where she doesn’t typically belong. Who done it, then, is the secret that strips all other secrets of their sanctity. In the better mysteries, the solution also turns the world of the story inside out, revealing how things actually work behind the façade. And, in the best mysteries, the detective herself is cracked open and remade, sometimes even destroyed, by the truth. This points to another shortcoming of series detectives: their fans find their familiar methods and quirks comforting and would be disappointed if each book didn’t serve up more of the same. The stakes with a series detective are by necessity low. But in a stand-alone crime novel like “Small Mercies” all bets are off.

Mary Pat’s search takes her from the haunts of the local gangsters to the exotic terrain of Harvard Square, where she finds herself as disgusted as she expected to be by the hippies, “every one of them a fucking embarrassment to their parents, who spent an ungodly amount of money to send them to the best school in the world”—a school no one in Southie could ever afford—only to have the kid return the favor “by walking around with dirty feet and singing shitty folk music about love, man, love.” She also feels painfully out of place in her red polyester shirt and plaid shirt jacket, “a working-class broad from the other side of the river who came into their world in her laughable Sears-catalog best.”

Lehane has always captured this tetchy, volatile mixture of working-class pride and shame with an expertise born of firsthand experience. Mary Pat thinks of it as “what happens when the suspicion that you aren’t good enough gets desperately rebuilt into the conviction that the rest of the world is wrong about you.” For all the residents’ ferocity in defending Southie, hardly anyone in “Small Mercies” really loves the place; it’s just that what their forebears have made of the neighborhood is their only inheritance. “You knew your neighbors,” a low-level thug thinks sullenly. “You shared your food and your rituals and your music. Nothing changed. It was the one fucking thing they couldn’t take from you. But they could. They would. They were. Forcing their notions and their ways and their lies on you.”

Among Southie’s few unequivocal partisans in “Small Mercies” is Mary Pat’s sister, Big Peg, who assures Mary Pat that nothing too terrible can happen to Jules, provided she remains in the neighborhood. When Mary Pat points out that her son died in the playground right across the street from her apartment, Big Peg blames the death on the boy’s stint in Vietnam. Mary Pat would like to believe it, but that same little voice reminds her that her son didn’t start using until he got back. She looks at Big Peg’s daughter (Little Peg, naturally) and sees a drab, twitchy child whom she remembers as having once “sparked like a snapped electric wire in a storm,” as being a kid filled with hilarity and joy. “ What takes that from them ? Mary Pat wonders. Is it us ?” The scene echoes one from “Gone, Baby, Gone,” in which the protagonists struggle mightily to return an abducted child to her feckless, druggie mother, who then props the kid in front of the TV and forgets her.

Mary Pat’s perception of Southie begins to peel away from the neighborhood’s defensive self-image. When it becomes generally known that Jules is probably dead and that Mary Pat’s inquiries are making trouble for the local mob, no one offers her aid or comfort. “You know, we always say we stand for things here,” she tells a former classmate. “We might not have much, but we have the neighborhood. We got a code. We watch out for one another.” Then she adds, “What a crock of shit.”

If this ferocious crime novel has a flaw, it lies in the unlikely transformation of its middle-aged protagonist from a working mother into a figure one of the local hoods calls “Mary Pat Jack,” honoring a now forgotten 1971 B movie, “Billy Jack,” about a part-Navajo veteran turned justice-seeking vigilante. (Lehane’s historical pop-culture references are impeccable.) The novel mentions, almost as an afterthought, that violence has always been a part of Mary Pat’s life, that she has loved fighting since she was a child. This doesn’t plausibly explain how she’s able to intimidate and outsmart an assortment of armed, hardened criminals. She’s meant to be scoured down by loss into an elemental, almost mythic personification of revenge; with nothing left, she has nothing left to fear. “I’m not a person anymore,” she tells Coyne. “I’m a testament.” This notion meshes uneasily with the novel’s other, more psychological tale of discovery: Mary Pat’s growing and humbling recognition of her own racism and of the hatred festering all around her in Southie.

Sometimes these paths coincide. In a group of co-workers, Mary Pat points out that a woman who rails about how Blacks are “all lazy and from broken homes and how the men all fuck around and don’t stick around to raise their kids” has described her own life history and character. “When’s the last time you did even half the amount of work around here the rest of us do?” Mary Pat asks. But such moments are incidental to Mary Pat’s awakening; self-criticism is its core. Every so often, she pauses in her merciless, almost superhuman, and admittedly highly gratifying campaign of vengeance to experience “a fresh horror of the self.” In the midst of so much devastation, she wonders about her “grubby desperation . . . to feel superior to someone. Anyone.”

Lehane has been wrestling with Boston’s ugly racial legacy since his first novel, “ A Drink Before the War ,” published in 1994. Patrick Kenzie, the book’s narrator, thinks of himself as more enlightened than his Dorchester neighbors. But, when he and his P.I. partner get caught in the middle of a war between rival Black gangs and one side sends shooters to take them out, he finds himself screaming a racial slur as they flee. Like the bloodstains on Lady Macbeth’s hands, the racism he inherited seems impossible to scrub out.

“I believed from a very young age that all race warfare is essentially class warfare,” Lehane once told an interviewer, “and that it’s in the better interests of the haves to have the have-nots fighting among themselves.” Mary Pat harbors glimmers of Lehane’s cross-racial class consciousness, but hers is not a story with enough of a future to allow her to do anything about it. All the same, she pointedly reflects that, though “she can’t blame the coloreds for wanting to escape their shithole,” surely “trading it for her shithole makes no sense.”

After federal desegregation orders took effect in Boston, in September, 1974, Black students braved jeering crowds of protesters throwing eggs, bottles, and bricks to find nearly empty classrooms. Not a single white student attended South Boston High School that day. Eventually, more than thirty thousand Boston public-school students left for private and parochial schools. As “Small Mercies” winds to its bitter end, Bobby Coyne argues about the orders with his girlfriend, agreeing that the segregation and inequity of Boston’s public-school system is “racist bullshit, and it’s unforgivable. But this is not the solution.” Then what is, she asks, causing him to pull up short. “I have no idea,” he replies. As Mary Pat’s mother might put it, he has just run out of road. ♦

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SMALL MERCIES

by Dennis Lehane ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2023

This taut, gripping mystery is also a novel of soul-searching, for the author and reader alike.

Racial tensions provide the powder keg for this explosive mystery.

A master of literary crime fiction, Lehane revisits the Boston of almost a half-century ago, when, in 1974, court-ordered school busing incites protest throughout the White neighborhoods of a very segregated city. As a working-class White woman trying to keep one step ahead of the bill collector, Mary Pat Fennessy has a close but tense relationship with her teenage daughter, Jules, who seems to be keeping secrets from her mother. One night Jules doesn’t come home, and Mary Pat is frantic. The next day at Meadow Lane Manor, the old folks’ home where she works as an aide, she learns that the son of Dreamy Williamson, one of her few Black co-workers, died in a mysterious subway incident that night. Mary Pat doesn’t know Dreamy well but likes her well enough. It seems that both of them have lost children now, but they respond differently, experience different levels of support from their communities, and come to learn that these seemingly separate losses—a death and a disappearance—have a connection that neither could have anticipated. The novel focuses on Mary Pat, illuminates her from within as a loving mother and basically a decent person who nonetheless shares the tribal prejudices of her Irish neighborhood toward people whom they feel are encroaching on their turf. It’s a hot summer, tensions are escalating, and threats of violence are at fever pitch. As Mary Pat keeps trying to find out what happened to Jules and why—wherever the truth may lead her—she discovers how much she has to learn about her daughter, the neighborhood, and the crime outfit whose power and authority have long gone unchallenged. She risks everything to discover the truth.

Pub Date: April 25, 2023

ISBN: 9780062129482

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | SUSPENSE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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DAUGHTER OF MINE

by Megan Miranda ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2024

Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.

The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.

When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”

Pub Date: April 9, 2024

ISBN: 9781668010440

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

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Could this be Dennis Lehane’s final novel? It’s certainly one of his best

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Small Mercies

By Dennis Lehane Harper: 320 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Early on in “ Small Mercies ,” which may be Dennis Lehane ’s final novel if one is to believe his recent interviews , 17-year-old Jules asks her mother, Mary Pat Fennessy, “You ever wonder if there’s some different place?”

The two women are walking the streets of Southie, the Boston neighborhood Lehane has often examined. It’s the summer of 1974, the city lighted to pop as it awaits the desegregation of its public schools through court-mandated busing . Jules is about to enter her senior year of high school, while Mary Pat is a hard 42 — her son, Noel, overdosed after coming home from Vietnam; her first husband, a small-time gangster, had to be declared dead; her most recent husband left her due to her capacity for hatred — and both are suffused with a troubling mixture of rage and yearning.

Jules’ question goes unanswered, Mary Pat is the kind of person who lives only in the moment these days, a cigarette and a beer at a time, maybe a plate of pot roast down at the bar, but other than that? She can’t imagine a life where anyone has the answers to such existential questions. Her life is in Southie. Her life is Southie. Its codes. Its ethics. Its morality. That those things have eroded into a microcosmic world fraught with addiction, violence and overt racism don’t seem to bother Mary Pat. She wishes for a better life for her daughter, just not in a better place.

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Nevertheless, the question hangs like a sickle over “Small Mercies,” particularly when Jules disappears on the same night a 20-year-old Black man named Auggie Williamson is found dead under the inbound subway platform in Columbia Station, the victim of multiple head traumas. That Jules was last seen in the same area — along with her minor-league crook boyfriend Rum, best friend Brenda and a drug dealer named George — only heightens concerns. Auggie wasn’t from Southie. Running into Rum and George, that would be bad news for him.

Under normal circumstances, a person would go to the cops if their daughter was missing, but Mary Pat plays by the rules of the neighborhood, opting instead to go to the Irish mob family run by Marty Butler. And for good reason: Rum and George both are connected to Butler, and dropping their names at the precinct could be a death sentence. Problem is, Marty Butler and his crew are leading the fight against desegregation — a clear nod to notorious gangster Whitey Bulger ’s role in the actual conflict — and have no time and even less desire to help Mary Pat. Which means Mary Pat needs to take justice in her own hands.

Turns out, Mary Pat is pretty good with her hands.

If this rings somewhat familiar, it’s because it’s the same essential plot turn Lehane used in “ Mystic River ,” when Jimmy Marcus goes looking for the killer of his teenage daughter, though in this case the power dynamic is reversed. Where Jimmy was the semi-retired king of the streets, a man respected and feared by locals and law enforcement alike, Mary Pat is a middle-aged woman who has begun to feel invisible, who has literally had to fight for everything in her life and who, with her daughter missing, must learn to walk “without falling down.” Luckily, time and memory have turned her into a resourceful woman, one who is “most ecstatic when she’s been wronged.”

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It would be easy for Lehane to paint Mary Pat as an empathetic figure while she searches for her daughter, particularly in the middle of such profound social tumult, the city of Boston teeming with aggression. He doesn’t. In fact, she’s just the opposite: Her racism is jarring and accurately portrayed, her anger at Black people seemingly a placeholder for all her losses, real and imagined.

The N-word shows up throughout the novel and Mary Pat’s rationalizations are hard to read, but Lehane’s best work — and this is indeed some of his finest writing, equal to his claustrophobic early novels like “ Darkness, Take My Hand ” and “ Gone Baby Gone ” — has always forced the reader to stare long into the most troubling aspects of our culture, our history, our neighbors. That Mary Pat’s arc includes a fundamental emotional change is welcome, but so too is her recognition that her biases and resentment have infected Jules, have spoiled something elemental in the one person left in the world that she truly loved. It’s shocking and moving.

Running parallel to — and eventually intersecting with — Mary Pat’s search is the work Det. Bobby Coyne must do to pierce Southie’s paranoid and corrupt ecosystem of silence. It turns out plenty of people saw Auggie’s final moments, but almost all were beset with amnesia or none-of-my-business-itis, conditions endemic to those who don’t realize there is life on the other side of the bridge or city limits or state line. But that’s the thing about living in what feels like a hermetically sealed box: It’s hard to imagine there’s air anywhere else, much less law and order.

Coyne is a classic Lehane detective: damaged by Vietnam, damaged by drugs, damaged by love. Where a lesser writer might make Coyne into a cliché, Lehane imbues him with an unlikely humanity, a sense of hope that a better world exists, even if he’s not exactly a do-gooder in his own right. Knowing Boston and policing’s future as we do, it’s hard to tell if he’s right or wrong in the choices he makes. Is there a better existence for Bobby Coyne? Maybe. A different life? Certainly. But that life might not come with a badge.

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It would be a shame if “Small Mercies” was indeed Lehane’s final novel, though the last several years have seen him turned into a much-in-demand TV writer and showrunner, including on 2022’s AppleTV+ hit “Black Bird.” If it really is, it’s a worthy coda to a literary career built on cramped streets filled with unreliable women and men, each trying to find balance in a world of cops and criminals and a town in which you can’t always tell them apart.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, small mercies.

When I read my first Dennis Lehane novel --- and I was there from the beginning with A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR in 1994 --- I felt like I had stepped into another planet. Never before had I experienced such lifelike and gritty prose. This book launched his Patrick Kenzie/Angela Gennaro series, and I didn’t want it to end.

Lehane has since become a stalwart in crime fiction, and he has worked on such TV series as “The Wire,” “Mr. Mercedes” and, most recently, the award-winning “Black Bird.” He is in an extremely small class of writers that includes George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly who have their finger on the pulse of the street like no one else can recreate. With the bulk of his books set in and around the city of Boston, you can practically smell the areas he describes and immerse yourself in the ethnicities of the various neighborhoods depicted.

"This may be Lehane’s best novel since MYSTIC RIVER. It is proof that he has not lost a bit of his feel for the streets or the pain and suffering of its residents."

SMALL MERCIES, Lehane’s highly anticipated new novel, takes us back to those streets. It is the summer of 1974, and the action mainly takes place on the eve of the infamous forced busing vote that pits whites against Blacks in the heart of Boston. Mary Pat Fennessy, the book’s protagonist, is no saint by any stretch. She has lived her entire life in the Southie neighborhood, which has developed a reputation for racial intolerance, and is a single mother struggling to raise a family that includes 17-year-old Jules. They don’t always see eye to eye, but Mary Pat loves her daughter more than anything in the world.

One ominous evening, Jules leaves the house and never returns. It happens to be the same night that a young Black man named Augie Williamson is found dead in a nearby subway station, having been struck by a train. The two stories converge in a way that only Lehane could have designed. Mary Pat conducts her own investigation, which puts her directly in the path of the Irish mob. In a scene that is vintage Lehane, Mary Pat kidnaps and confronts a drug dealer who knows what happened to Jules. She forces him to take some of his own product, high-grade heroin, and gets him to confess the truth.

This sets up a finale filled with retribution and revenge, all comfortably placed amidst the busing issue that has turned Mary Pat’s neighborhood into a war zone. She tells Detective Bobby Coyne, “My life was my daughter. They took my life when they took hers. I’m not a person anymore, Bobby, I’m a ghost. I’m a testament. That’s what ghosts are --- they’re testaments to what never should have happened and must be fixed before their spirits leave the world.” This is classic Lehane dialogue with a voice that is completely unique in crime fiction.

This may be Lehane’s best novel since MYSTIC RIVER. It is proof that he has not lost a bit of his feel for the streets or the pain and suffering of its residents. He takes us right back to the turbulent ’70s and the racial tension in Boston, which is exacerbated by the desegregation of the public school system that will forever change the face of the city. In the middle of all of this is a mother looking for her daughter and seeking revenge in her name. SMALL MERCIES is a book that you will not be able to shake easily.

Reviewed by Ray Palen on April 28, 2023

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

• Publication Date: April 23, 2024
• Genres: Fiction , Suspense , Thriller
• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• ISBN-10: 006212949X
• ISBN-13: 9780062129499

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Small Mercies : Book summary and reviews of Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

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Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

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Published Apr 2023 320 pages Genre: Thrillers Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling writer returns with a masterpiece to rival Mystic River —an all-consuming tale of revenge, family love, festering hate, and insidious power, set against one of the most tumultuous episodes in Boston's history.

In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessey is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of "Southie," the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart. One night Mary Pat's teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn't come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances. The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched—asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don't take kindly to any threat to their business. Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city's desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.

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Reader reviews.

"This taut, gripping mystery is also a novel of soul-searching, for the author and reader alike." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Powerful, unforgettable…[a] remarkable novel about racism, violence, and parental vengeance." — Library Journal (starred review) " Small Mercies is thought provoking, engaging, enraging, and can't-put-it-down entertainment." —Stephen King " Small Mercies is a jaw-dropping thriller, set in the fury of Boston's 1974 school-desegregation crisis, and propelled by a hell-bent woman who's impossible to ignore. Thought-provoking and heart-thumping, it's a resonant, unflinching story written by a novelist who is simply one of the best around." —Gillian Flynn "Dennis Lehane is a supernova and this is a novel that will throw your entire goddamn solar system out of alignment. Lehane has gone from strength to strength but never has he been more truthful, more heartbreaking, more essential. In the midst of our racial nightmare Small Mercies asks some of the only questions that matter: 'What's gonna change? When's it gonna change? Where's it gonna change? How's it gonna change?' This book is impossible to put down and its dark radiances will stay with you a long, long time." —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of This Is How You Lose Her "Dennis Lehane peels back the layers of his characters like a sculptor finding the face of an angel in a block of stone. By a true master at the top of his game, Small Mercies is vintage Lehane. Beautiful, brutal, lyrical and blisteringly honest. Not to be missed." —S.A. Cosby, bestselling author of Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland "Beautiful. I was blown away by how Dennis Lehane was able to bring such a deeply unfamiliar world into my heart. Small Mercies is hilarious and heartbreaking, infuriating and unforgettable." —Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award winning author "Without flinching, Dennis Lehane shines a lantern on a dark story, one the reader will not forget." —James Lee Burke

Author Information

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Dennis Lehane Author Biography

Photo: Ashleigh-Faye

Dennis Lehane grew up in Boston. Since his first novel, A Drink Before the War , won the Shamus Award, he has published thirteen more novels that have been translated into more than 30 languages and become international bestsellers: Darkness, Take My Hand ; Sacred ; Gone, Baby, Gone ; Prayers for Rain ; Mystic River ; Shutter Island ; The Given Day ; Moonlight Mile; Live by Night ; World Gone By ; Since We Fell , and Small Mercies . Four of his novels – Live by Night , Mystic River , Gone, Baby, Gone , and Shutter Island – have been adapted into films. A fifth, The Drop , was adapted by Lehane himself into a film starring Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, and James Gandolfini in his final role. Lehane was a staff writer on the acclaimed HBO series, The Wire , and also worked as a writer-producer on ...

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StarTribune

Review: 'small mercies,' by dennis lehane.

Dennis Lehane's last novel from 2017, the psychological thriller "Since We Fell," was his first to unfold through a female protagonist's perspective. Rachel Childs was a formidable heroine whose concealed traits and surprise impulses were revealed with each narrative twist and turn. Lehane's latest novel, "Small Mercies," is fronted by another strong woman. Single mother Mary Pat Fennessy is described by a character as "broken but unbreakable." She is also unstoppable as she embarks on a mission that is both a search for answers and a quest for revenge.

Lehane's high-octane drama plays out against a backdrop of historical events. It is the torrid summer of 1974 and the eve of Boston's controversial desegregation of public high schools. In South Boston, Mary Pat's white, working-class, Irish-American home turf, mob chief Marty Butler — "Southie's protector" — has organized anti-busing protests. Mary Pat finds herself with a far more pressing concern when her 17-year-old daughter Jules fails to come home one night. The following day, Mary Pat shows up for work at Meadow Lane old folks' home and discovers that her Black colleague's son, Auggie Williamson, was found dead on the track of a subway station early that morning.

Jules still doesn't appear so Mary Pat makes her own inquiries throughout the neighborhood. She shows her daughter's knuckleheaded boyfriend who's boss and dredges up the past with an unwelcome visit to her ex-husband. She learns that Jules has been hanging around with George Dunbar, an "untouchable merchant of poison" whose drugs killed her son, Noah. As if that news wasn't bad enough, she is hit by the bombshell that Jules has been the mistress of one of Butler's henchmen.

When Detective Bobby Coyne arrives on the scene chasing a lead that links Jules' disappearance to Auggie's death, Mary Pat is buoyed by the breakthrough. But then Butler informs her that her investigations are creating too much noise and tries to buy her silence. Fearing the worst but refusing to back down, Mary Pat, "built for battle," becomes a one-woman army.

"Small Mercies" is vintage Lehane. The dialogue is punchy, the action gritty and the mystery intriguing. Lehane's prose is deliciously raw: Jules is waiting on a broken heart "the way miners wait on a black lung"; Mary Pat breaks a nose with her fist and "it sounds like a cue ball shattering a tight rack." There is expertly cranked-up tension, with both the social unrest ("this city is about to go boom ") and Mary Pat's decision to cross "a border between worlds" and take on Butler and his crew.

The book's main highlight, though, is its central character. Mary Pat, who "looks like she came off a conveyor belt for tough Irish broads," is a true force of nature and one of Lehane's most memorable creations. Despite, or perhaps because of her flaws, we champion her all the way through this electrifying tale about race relations, retribution and power.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Small Mercies

By: Dennis Lehane.

Publisher: Harper, 320 pages, $30.

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Dennis Lehane on his new novel 'Small Mercies'

Scott Simon

NPR Scott Simon talks with author Dennis Lehane about his new novel, "Small Mercies." It's set in 1974 Boston, during the protests over court-mandated desegregation of public schools there.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

There's a memory from his childhood that Dennis Lehane has never managed to shake. The bestselling novelist of "Mystic River," "Gone, Baby, Gone" and other books recalls the summer of 1974. The city of Boston had erupted in protests over court-mandated busing to desegregate public schools. Driving home, his father took a wrong turn straight into a protest, and from the back seat, young Dennis Lehane saw what looked like life-sized dolls hanging from street lamps.

DENNIS LEHANE: People lit them on fire. And it was medieval, and it was a very strange thing to be trapped in when you were 9 years old.

SIMON: Dennis Lehane's new novel, "Small Mercies," is set during that summer of 1974. A Black student dies in a baffling subway accident. A white teenage girl goes missing. And a note to our listeners - our discussion will refer to the use of racial epithets. The novel follows the girl's mother, Mary Pat Fennessy, on the hunt for her missing daughter. She is loving, hardworking, ferocious and a very specific protagonist for Dennis Lehane.

LEHANE: I've known a lot of Mary Pats, and I'd never seen them represented in literature before or on film. There is a certain type of woman - usually a woman who came out of the projects that I remember from being a kid, but also some who just lived in - you know, they lived in what we called three-deckers, women who came from poverty. And they were capable of going toe to toe with a man in a fistfight. That wasn't saying they'd win, but they were capable of doing it, and they were reasonably fearless. So I got this image in my head of a woman getting back-talked by somebody - a man, a male - and beating the hell out of him in a bar. That's kind of where I started.

SIMON: At one point, following up in one of her own leads, Mary Pat goes to Harvard Yard. She feels that students and hippies and, to use her terminology, snot noses are all staring at her. Why?

LEHANE: Because she's poor. She doesn't fit in this world. If you were to take the subway from - I think it was seven stops - from Broadway to Harvard on the red line in Boston, you know, that's changing worlds. It's changing cultures. It's changing - it's vast economic difference. It's a route that I took when I was a kid. My mother insisted that I take piano lessons, which I did not want to do, but she made me take piano lessons with this nun over in Harvard Square. And so I would every Wednesday take the subway from Columbia Station, which is where I grew up in Dorchester, to Harvard Square, get out, and I don't know if my mother intended it - I know my mother wanted to give me some type of culture - but what happened to me was I didn't take to music but 20 bookstores within a square mile in Harvard Square when I was a kid, and that's what I took to. If I got there early, I just wandered bookstores. And it opened up my eyes to the world. So when Mary Pat goes there, she says at one point she would feel more comfortable in another country - Ireland, perhaps - than she would feel in Harvard Square.

SIMON: Mary Pat doesn't like the idea of school busing - Black kids from Roxbury bused to South Boston, white kids from South Boston to Roxbury. And at one point, she muses that the politicians who support it, like Teddy Kennedy, are, quote - profanity alert are, quote, "just another case of the rich [expletive] in their suburban castles in their all-white towns telling the poor people stuck in the city how things are going to go." Pretty compelling argument, isn't it, for both Blacks and whites?

LEHANE: Yes. And that was something I really wanted to examine, that desegregation of the Boston public schools had to happen. So on one hand, you have what needed to happen, which is desegregation. Then you had the method by which it happened, which was selective forced busing, which was not necessarily a good idea. And it was a case of the neighborhoods, the working-class neighborhoods, once again being told without a vote what they were going to do. And the people who constructed that social experiment could sit back without it affecting their lives one bit.

SIMON: Let me ask you about the language.

LEHANE: Of course.

SIMON: Yeah, a lot of it's raw.

LEHANE: Yep.

SIMON: A lot of racial epithets.

LEHANE: Yes.

SIMON: Those are hard to use these days, aren't they?

LEHANE: They should be. But they were very easy to use back then, at least where I grew up. There's a photograph on the front of the book that was taken by Eugene Richards.

SIMON: This is a little boy looking up at it looks like mounted policemen, and it says Southie, God's country on the back of his T-shirt.

LEHANE: Yes. And that was a Eugene Richards shot taken during a busing protest right out in front of South Boston High School. And to see it now and to see the graffiti that he captures and graffiti that was written all over the city - not just South Boston, but all over the city - including KKK, including the worst racial epithets you can think of and kill all the - fill in the blank. It's shocking, and it's sobering because you realize you can't hide from those photographs.

SIMON: There's a line that's been ringing in my head of yours. Hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you're not even looking.

LEHANE: Oh, that's my favorite line in the book. I'm glad. I'm glad that got you. The book is very much about the price of hate. Mary Pat will acknowledge that she has some racism, but she doesn't understand the depths of it at all. She thinks, well, compared to all these other rabid racists around me, I'm not really that racist. And this becomes a journey for her to understand the terrible legacy of her racism, the way it was passed down to her, the way she passed it down to her children and how it's all ultimately connected to everything that goes on in this book. And that's the great tragedy. And at one point she comes to a realization that it's something that was sold to her and that then she sold it to her own children.

And she has this heartbreaking line for me 'cause I didn't even plan the line. It just popped out of me, which is, you know, they know. They always know. Even at 5, they know that what you're telling them is a lie, but you wear them down. And then ultimately they embrace it. Nobody's born racist - just not. Doesn't happen. I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say that this late in the world's becoming, if you will, but you don't see two 4-year-old kids show up at a playground and not play with each other because one's Black and one's white. But by 8, that may be very likely. So I really wanted to look at it as this virus that is handed down generationally. And that's - that became the impetus to write the book that became what in some ways was an expulsion for me, I think, of things I've been carrying around inside of me since I was 9.

SIMON: Is "Small Mercies" your last novel?

LEHANE: I don't know. I really don't know. So I'm out of contract for the first time in 25 years. I've been swept up into this wonderful world of premium television that I love. I'm a social being. It was never natural for me to sit in a room pecking away all the time alone. So this book, though, was written while I was actually running a television show, and it came out of me because it needed to come out of me, which is how you become a writer in the first place. So is it my last book? I don't know. If it is, I'm OK with that. That's great. It seems like a good mic drop to me. But if it's not, it'll be that another book needs to come out of me. Not because I owe the publisher a book, not because of my deadline, not because, you know, I'm worried about my agent's bottom line - none of that. I just will need to tell a story. And if that happens, I would love to write another book.

SIMON: Dennis Lehane - his new novel, "Small Mercies." Thank you so much for being with us.

LEHANE: Thank you, Scott.

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Small Mercies

51 pages • 1 hour read

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Summary and Study Guide

Written in 2023 by acclaimed mystery and crime author Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies is set in South Boston and outlines the many struggles of Mary Pat Fennessy as she searches for her missing daughter in a city rocked by two of the darkest periods in Boston history: the 1974 busing riots and the murderous reign of crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger. Lehane originally made his reputation with contemporary crime thrillers such as Gone Baby Gone (1998) and Mystic River (2001), but his more recent novels have explored the history of South Boston, including The Given Day (2008), which highlights the infamous 1919 police strike in Boston, and Live by Night (2012), which takes place during Prohibition.

Whereas Lehane’s other historical novels focus on multiple generations of the fictional Coughlin family, Small Mercies is a stand-alone novel that sheds a penetrating light onto many contemporary issues, such as racial discrimination and violence, incidents of police violence, and the widespread effects of organized crime. Boston had to revisit Bulger’s crimes when he was arrested in 2011 after a long disappearance, and his former associates and victims appeared as witnesses or observers at his 2013 trial. High-profile incidents of police violence across the country also forced many cities, including Boston, to confront their own legacies of racial discrimination, and thus, the plot of Small Mercies is relevant to many ongoing social issues. Apple TV is currently developing the book into a miniseries.

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This summary is based on the first hardcover edition published by HarperCollins (New York: 2023).

Content Warning: Both the novel and this guide contain depictions of racism, racial discrimination, drug abuse and addiction, violence (including the unrealized prospect of a school shooting), and statutory rape.

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Plot Summary

Small Mercies is the story of Mary Pat Fennessy, a single mother eking out a hardscrabble existence as a caretaker at a Catholic nursing home in 1974 South Boston. The summer heat is punishing, and tensions are high due to a recent federal court order to desegregate schools by busing students from majority-Black or white neighborhoods to one another’s schools. Mary Pat has suffered grievously—her first husband disappeared in a likely gangland murder, her second husband left her, and her son died of a heroin overdose. She sees the controversy around desegregation and busing as just one more difficulty that she and her 17-year-old daughter Julia must navigate. One day, Julia (whom everyone calls Jules) does not return home after a night with friends, and that same morning, Mary Pat sees a news story about a young Black man named Augustus “Auggie” Williamson who died in the Columbia subway station in Dorchester: a majority-white area. She quickly deduces that he is the son of her coworker, whom she knows as “Dreamy.” As more time elapses and Jules does not resurface, Mary Pat undertakes more aggressive measures to find her daughter, including beating up her boyfriend at a bar owned by local crime lord Marty Butler . She is soon visited by Detective Michael “Bobby” Coyne , who tells her that eyewitness testimony implicates Julia in Auggie’s death. Mary Pat also discovers that Jules was having an affair with one of Marty Butler’s top hitmen, Frank Toomey. Armed with that knowledge, she asks one of Butler’s lieutenants, Brian Shea, to find out what happened to Jules, but shortly afterward, she receives a visit from the boss himself, who offers her a package of money to go to Florida and forget the whole thing. With that, Mary Pat realizes that Jules must be dead.

Mary Pat decides to find out the truth about Jules’s likely murder in order to exact vengeance on those responsible. After kidnapping and torturing Jules’s boyfriend, she learns that Jules had become pregnant and was demanding financial support from Frank. Overhearing the conversation and distressed by Frank’s refusal to help Jules, Auggie Williamson solicitously asked if she was all right. She and her companions, whose racism caused them to be outraged by Auggie’s presence, chased Auggie into the subway station and threw beer bottles at him until he knocked himself unconscious against the side of a train. As they fled from the station, Frank emerged to demand that they kill Auggie. After Jules delivered the killing blow with a brick in order to prevent her companions from inflicting an even more painful death on Auggie, she got into Frank’s car. Perceiving her method of killing Auggie to be “merciful” and therefore “weak,” Frank took her back to Butler’s house and stabbed her in the heart.

Mary Pat’s next step is to find George Dunbar , a local drug dealer from whom her son used to purchase heroin. She discovers that George is selling weapons to Black activists and drug dealers in Mattapan. She later ambushes him and forces him to take a dose supply of his own heroin, at which point he confesses that Jules’s body is buried beneath the concrete of Butler’s home. Mary Pat then sets Butler’s house on fire so that the police will find the body. The police also learn from George that the Butler organization was selling weapons to Black drug dealers in the expectation that they would attack South Boston High and thereby undermine the busing initiative at its inception.

Mary Pat then goes to an anti-busing rally to find Frank Toomey, and after a long period of surveillance, attacks him in his driveway, kidnaps him, and drives him to the fort at Castle Island. Soon surrounded by Butler’s men, she executes Frank and shoots Brian Shea, who is then killed in an exchange of gunfire. Mary Pat is shot by Butler and dies while trying to return fire. After the fact, it is discovered that Detective Bobby Coyne will most likely be unable to bring charges against Butler for Jules’s death or Mary Pat’s death. Before Mary Pat’s death, she used the money that Marty Butler gave her to provide Jules with a mausoleum regularly stocked with fresh flowers.

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Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane’s last novel, Since We Fell , came out in 2017. He smashes that silence with Small Mercies, the most powerful novel I’ve read since S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears. In fact, any book group that chooses to pair these two unforgettable novels will have enough material to discuss for several months.

Lehane’s novel is inspired by one night in 1974 when his father took a wrong turn, and the family car ended up in the middle of the anti-busing riots in Boston. Imagine the fear of a nine-year-old boy who saw figures burning in effigy, and experienced the rocking car in the midst of an angry mob. That incident turned into Small Mercies, a novel of Boston at the time, with its rage and fear and explosive possiblities.

Mary Pat Fennessey grew up in the Irish projects. She’s never lived anywhere else, and she raised both of her children there. She already lost one child to drugs and the streets. She’s worried about sending her seventeen-year-old daughter, Jules, into the violence of an integrated high school in just ninety days after the court ruling saying Boston’s high schools will be integrated. But, she worries more about losing her daughter to her drug-dealing and using friends, all products of the white projects.

The night that Jules doesn’t come home, a young Black man dies in the subway. Mary Pat recognizes Auggie Wiliamson’s name in the newspaper because she works with his mother. Despite all the gossip, Mary Pat wonders if it’s fear and racism that assumes the young man was a drug dealer. But, at the moment, she has greater worries. Jules is missing.

Mary Pat’s first instinct is to question her friends, and then ask for help from the men who control and “protect” the residents of the projects, Marty Butler’s crew. She even talks about her missing daughter when a homicide cop, Bobby Coyne, comes looking for Jules, asking about the night of Williamson’s death. But, Coyne has no idea that Mary Pat’s search will explode into violence. He can only watch in awe as she burns through the neighborhood, a tough Southie broad demanding answers. What happened to her daughter, Jules?

Small Mercies is a remarkable novel that explores the racism, hatred and fear in Boston in 1974 through the life of one woman, and the observations of a local cop. It’s a rage-filled story that demonstrates the ability to change, just as Cosby’s novel did. As I said, pair these two stories of grieving parents who demand answers. They’re both representative of a time and place, but they have so much to say about the simmering anger in this country.

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane. Harper, 2023. ISBN 9780062129482 (hardcover), 320p.

FTC Full Disclosure – I received a galley to review for a journal.

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14 Comments

A new Lehane novel is a cause for celebration. Great review.

Sandra, I’m thinking that when COVID shut down Hollywood, Dennis Lehane had time to write a novel again. It is a reason to celebrate.

Terrific review. It’s been a long time since I read a Lehane – I know I missed a few – but if you compare it to Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, it is a must read for sure,

This one is a a must read, Jeff. I even ordered a signed copy from The Poisoned Pen although I’ve already read it. And, there are really no spoilers in the review. There’s just enough to tantalize, I hope.

I also pre-ordered a signed copy from the Pen based upon your mention of the book earlier in the year. I have never read anything by Dennis Lehane, but am looking forward to reading this. Noticed he has a detective series set in Boston. Has anyone read that?

Jennifer, yes. It is very dark in parts but really good.

I agree with Jeff, Jennifer. I read that entire series, and it was excellent except for the last book, written years later, probably because fans wanted it. Not up to the earlier books.

Thanks, Jeff and Lesa. Will look for the books after I finish up the Bill Slider series.

Jennifer, don’t miss Lehane’s Mystic River. A modern classic, beautifully written and stunning in every respect. That book alone is enough to ensure his legacy.

Sandra is right, Jennifer. I have to say, though, that I preferred Small Mercies. And, Gone Baby Gone, in the PI series, is excellent.

Thanks, Sandra. Will check out that book as well!

I definitely want to read that one!

Excellent book, Carol.

Oooooh I cannot wait!! Glad he wrote a new one!

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Small Mercies

In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of “Southie,” the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.

One night Mary Pat’s teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances.

The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched—asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don’t take kindly to any threat to their business.

Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city’s desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.

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Small Mercies: A Detective Mystery Hardcover – April 25, 2023

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Instant New York Times Bestseller

“ Small Mercies  is thought provoking, engaging, enraging, and can’t-put-it-down entertainment.” — Stephen King

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling writer returns with a masterpiece to rival Mystic River —an all-consuming tale of revenge, family love, festering hate, and insidious power, set against one of the most tumultuous episodes in Boston’s history.

In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of “Southie,” the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.

One night Mary Pat’s teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances.

The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched—asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don’t take kindly to any threat to their business.

Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city’s desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.

• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date April 25, 2023
• Dimensions 6 x 1.05 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0062129481
• ISBN-13 978-0062129482
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

"Excellent and unflinching . . . . [ Small Mercies ] has all the hallmarks of Lehane at his best: a propulsive plot, a perfectly drawn cast of working-class Boston Irish characters, razor-sharp wit and a pervasive darkness through which occasional glimmers of hope peek out like snowdrops in early spring . . . . Lehane masterfully conveys how the past shapes the present, lingering even after the players are gone." — J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times Book Review

“[A] ferocious crime novel. . . Land[s] like a fist to the solar plexus. . . Full of booby traps, but the metaphorical kind that blow up futures instead of limbs. . .[As] in the best mysteries, the detective herself is cracked open and remade. . .” — Laura Miller, The New Yorker

“Joltingly fierce . . . Dennis Lehane spares nothing and no one in his crackerjack new novel.” — Janet Maslin,  The New York Times

“ Small Mercies is thought provoking, engaging, enraging, and can’t-put-it-down entertainment.”  — Stephen King

“ Small Mercies is a jaw-dropping thriller, set in the fury of Boston's 1974 school-desegregation crisis, and propelled by a hell-bent woman who's impossible to ignore. Thought-provoking and heart-thumping, it's a resonant, unflinching story written by a novelist who is simply one of the best around.” — Gillian Flynn

"Arguably his masterpiece.” — Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year

“Without flinching, Dennis Lehane shines a lantern on a dark story, one the reader will not forget.” — James Lee Burke

"Dennis Lehane is a supernova and this is a novel that will throw your entire goddamn solar system out of alignment. Lehane has gone from strength to strength but never has he been more truthful, more heartbreaking, more essential. In the midst of our racial nightmare  Small Mercies  asks some of the only questions that matter: 'What’s gonna change? When’s it gonna change? Where’s it gonna change? How’s it gonna change?' This book is impossible to put down and its dark radiances will stay with you a long, long time.” — Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of This Is How You Lose Her

"Dennis Lehane peels back the layers of his characters like a sculptor finding the face of an angel in a block of stone. By a true master at the top of his game, Small Mercies is vintage Lehane. Beautiful, brutal, lyrical and blisteringly honest. Not to be missed." — S.A. Cosby, bestselling author of Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland

“Beautiful. I was blown away by how Dennis Lehane was able to bring such a deeply unfamiliar world into my heart. Small Mercies is hilarious and heartbreaking, infuriating and unforgettable.” — Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award winning author

“Lehane has built a career as a philosopher of the human animal.” — Noah Hawley

"Gritty . . . Brings readers into the mind of Coyne, a Vietnam vet and recovered heroin user who becomes a partial confidante to Mary Pat. His quest for personal salvation, if you will, is a welcome balance to her grief-driven descent." — Wall Street Journal

“You’ll be lucky if you read a more engaging novel this year.”  — The Times  (London)

"Masterful . . . . If Lehane’s sociological precision gives Small Mercies a gravitas seldom found in crime novels, Mary Pat Fennessy, a 'mother . . . built for battle,' enhances the effect. She is a 20th-century version of a Fury out of Greek mythology, and her one-woman war against the mob is a fearsome thing to behold." — Washington Post

"Lehane book is a searing depiction of what happens when powerful emotional constructs such as maternal rage, racism, and militant isolationism collide and combust, leaving only the most tentative green shoots to poke through the ashes." — Air Mail

"This taut, gripping mystery is also a novel of soul-searching, for the author and reader alike." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Powerful, unforgettable…[a] remarkable novel about racism, violence, and parental vengeance.” — Library Journal  (starred review)

"A complex, multidimensional tragedy of epic proportions . . . Lehane straddles the line between historical fiction and thriller as dexterously as anyone, and this is his best work so far.” — Booklist (starred review)

"Where a lesser writer might make Coyne into a cliché, Lehane imbues him with an unlikely humanity, a sense of hope that a better world exists, even if he’s not exactly a do-gooder in his own right." — Los Angeles Times

"As always, Lehane is terrific at finely drawn character sketches thrumming with both immediacy and humor." — Boston Globe

"Ambitious and multi-layered." — Financial Times (UK)

"Every page holds a line or a passage to savor and admire. More than a few will have readers cracking up. The lasting impression, though, will be of Mary Pat Fennessey—easily one of Lehane’s most indelible creations—a hard-bitten, foul-mouthed, 'tough Irish broad' from the Southie housing projects . . . . This potent mix of love and hate, racism and tribalism, revenge and reckoning, is Lehane writing at the top of his game, and will surely be one of the best books of the year." — Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor

"At the heart of this book is a masterly psychological study of racism. Lehane provides top-notch dialogue, an absorbing mystery, and and evocation of a historical moment foreshadowing America's 21st-century ethnic divide." — The Sunday Times (UK)

“ Small Mercies emerges as the ultimate Southie novel, a witness’s wrenching reckoning with a neighborhood that took care of its own, closed its borders, and fell to the enemy inside its walls.” — Chicago Review of Books

"This superior crime drama from bestseller Lehane explores deep-rooted racism in South Boston." — Publishers Weekly

"[A] high-octane drama . . . . Vintage Lehane. The dialogue is punchy, the action gritty and the mystery intriguing. Lehane's prose is deliciously raw . . . . The book's main highlight, though, is its central character. Mary Pat [...] is a true force of nature and one of Lehane's most memorable creations. Despite, or perhaps because of her flaws, we champion her all the way through this electrifying tale about race relations, retribution and power." — Malcolm Forbes, The Star Tribune

“Set amid Boston’s school busing crisis in the ‘70s, this explosive thriller begins when two mothers, Black and White, lose their children—one dead, one missing—on a sweltering summer night. With nothing left to live for, Mary Pat Fennessy turns against her own community. Lehane at his best.” — People Magazine

"Lehane is now well established as one of America's finest crime writers, who superbly blends uncompromising social history with uncompromising tales of what people driven to the limit will do. As ever,  Small Mercies  is populated with a wide-ranging collection of unforgettable people." — Reader’s Digest (UK)

"An old school, Southie mystery thriller that I think a lot of people are going to love to read.” — Boston.com

"Lehane is a rare writer who makes you want to read fast and slow at the same time. His propulsive plots compel you to keep turning pages. Yet, his profoundly perceptive writing makes you want to pause—to laugh at an exquisitely caustic description or to tend the hairline crack a character has just opened in your heart . . . . What genuinely gives this novel texture is its language. Lehane is a master at authentic conversation, dialogue that feels like it just exited the mouth of a real person." — WBUR

"The bard of Boston returns with a raw-knuckled tale of school integration, racial tension, and a pair of suspicious deaths that rattles both sides of that divide circa 1974." — Entertainment Weekly

"Riveting." — Tampa Bay Times

“If you read only one crime fiction novel this year, it should be Small Mercies .” — Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine

About the Author

Dennis Lehane is the author of thirteen novels—including the New York Times bestsellers Live by Night; Moonlight Mile; Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island ; and The Given Day —as well as Coronado , a collection of short stories and a play. He grew up in Boston, MA and now lives in California with his family.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper (April 25, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062129481
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062129482
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.04 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.05 x 9 inches
• #531 in Murder Thrillers
• #1,244 in Literary Fiction (Books)
• #1,929 in Suspense Thrillers

About the author

Dennis lehane.

Dennis Lehane (born Aug 4th, 1966) is an American author. He has written several novels, including the New York Times bestseller Mystic River, which was later made into an Academy Award winning film, also called Mystic River, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon (Lehane can be briefly seen waving from a car in the parade scene at the end of the film). The novel was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and won the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction, and France's Prix Mystere de la Critique.

Bio and photo from Goodreads.

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Dennis Lehane's 'Small Mercies'

As dark as my books get, they’re always about the hope that can push up through the darkness,” Dennis Lehane says via Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “The word hope , I’d bet, shows up more in my books than anything other than the f-bomb. It’s hope and feckin’ hope. Feckin’ hope is everywhere.”

Lehane has written 13 novels, several of which ( Gone, Baby, Gone ; Mystic River ; Shutter Island ) have been turned into movies, and has worked on shows including The Wire and Mr. Mercedes . Though Lehane’s literary success is immense­­­­—his books have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide, according to Harper, his publisher, and have been translated into 37 languages—the demands of writing novels have taken their toll. He even wonders whether Small Mercies , his new novel publishing in April, could be his last.

“Writing prose got harder for me with every book,” Lehane says. “The better you are at this, the harder it gets. This could be my last book, or I could wake up tomorrow and have a story I have to tell. I don’t know. If it’s my last I think it’s a good bookend—a nice mic drop.”

Small Mercies is set in Boston in 1974, when the city’s public schools were ordered by a court to desegregate and student busing was put into effect, sparking protests and riots. “I had wanted to address school busing my entire career,” Lehane says. “The story of Boston is the story of busing.”

Lehane grew up in the rough-and-tumble Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, one of five children raised by Irish immigrant parents. As a kid, he was exposed to a lot of casual racism.

“People I saw every day were using the n-word,” he says. “My parents didn’t do it, but almost everybody else I knew did. It gives you a disturbing entrée into the human condition. Racism is passed down like bad genes.”

Lehane was nine in 1974 and remembers seeing an anti-desegregation protest while riding in the car with his father, who took a wrong turn into the path of picketers. “This was the galvanizing event of my life,” he says. “I thought, this is adult society? This is what we’re supposed to be looking up to?”

Small Mercies tells the tense story of a white South Boston mom who’s trying to find her missing teen daughter. The girl has been implicated in the death of a black teen on the eve of the busing crisis. Lehane wrote the thriller in 2021, in New Orleans, while working on the Golden Globe–winning crime drama miniseries Black Bird , which he created.

The novel’s flawed characters aren’t always easy to root for—and that’s how Lehane likes it. “I want my characters to be contradictory,” he explains. “We’re all fucked up as a species. There’s good in the worst of us, bad in the best of us. I find that paradox infinitely fascinating to write about.”

Ann Rittenberg, Lehane’s agent, says Lehane has a palpable enthusiasm for his craft. “When he’s cracked the spine of a new story he sounds like a kid at Christmas,” she notes. “People think that because there’s a dark side to his writing, he’s a moody person, but you’d enjoy having a beer with Dennis more than anyone else. He’s an old soul, an empath. The distinctiveness of his voice brings an immediacy to his characters.”

Noah Eaker, Lehane’s editor at Harper, says, “Dennis is constantly evolving. Every book shows a mastery of his subject. With Small Mercies I was under the spell of the mystery and, in the end, realized that Dennis was saying so much more about power and the ways it’s wielded in our communities—about a legacy of racism that the country doesn’t seem able to overcome.”

Lehane hustled in his 20s to become a writer. After getting a master’s degree in creative writing from Florida International University, he wrote stories while working side jobs (parking cars, tending bar). “I knew I couldn’t fail,” he says. His debut, A Drink Before the War , was published in 1994. “I didn’t want to wind up back at the Banshee on Dot Avenue and have my friends say, ‘Hey Hemingway, bring me a Bud.’ Not happening.”

A wiz at creating cinematic novels, Lehane was tapped in 2003 to write scripts for The Wire . Though he confesses, “I didn’t know what I was doing,” his success there led to a second career in Hollywood. In 2013, he left Boston for L.A., where he lives with his wife, a teacher he met in 2018 through friends, and his two daughters from his first marriage. “I was always an East Coast guy,” he says. “You’re only real if you’re from New York, Chicago, Boston, or Philly. Everyone else is nobodies from nowhere—that was my mentality. But I love it here.”

Lehane has a deal with Apple TV+, where he’s creating a series based on Small Mercies , as well as a series about arsonists inspired by the true crime podcast Firebug . He enjoys the collaborative atmosphere of a writers room—a less lonely world than that of the novelist. “I meet so many writers who are comfortable being alone or they’re socially awkward, and I’m not that way,” he says. “I like people.”

Amy Schiffman, who’s been Lehane’s books-to-film agent for nearly 20 years, has watched him excel in the competitive film industry. “Working with Dennis is a joy,” Schiffman says. “Even though he’s extremely successful, he’s grateful for everything. He has a big heart and is generous with other writers, particularly those who want to do what he does.”

Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl , credits Lehane with helping her become a writer. “Reading Mystic River enabled me to figure out how to write my first novel,” Flynn says. “I’m a Lehane-ologist. I’ve studied his storytelling for a long time. He’s one of the greats. He has this terrifying brilliance at taking on spiky, nasty truths in a way that’s brutally frank but incredibly human.”

The secret to Lehane’s success may be his ability to approach each story like it’s the last. “I’ve worked my ass off on everything I’ve written,” he says. “I’m proud of my work ethic. The guilt you feel as a child of immigrants who gets successful can only be mitigated by that. My old man, if he was still alive, would ask, ‘Are you working hard?’ Yes. ‘Well then, there you go. Cutting any corners?’ No. ‘Well then, there you go.’ ”

Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid .

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Dennis Lehane taps his Boston roots for novel 'Small Mercies'

For the original audio, click here .

Author Dennis Lehane ‘s vivid recollections of growing up in Boston during the busing desegregation crisis in the mid-1970s inspired his 2023 novel “ Small Mercies .”

The book is out in paperback this week. We revisit host Tiziana Dearing’s conversation with Lehane, which aired last July.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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For the original audio, click here .

Author Dennis Lehane 's vivid recollections of growing up in Boston during the busing desegregation crisis in the mid-1970s inspired his 2023 novel " Small Mercies ."

The book is out in paperback this week. We revisit host Tiziana Dearing's conversation with Lehane, which aired last July.

This segment aired on April 24, 2024.

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Dennis Lehane taps his Boston roots for novel 'Small Mercies'

For the original audio, click here .

Author Dennis Lehane ‘s vivid recollections of growing up in Boston during the busing desegregation crisis in the mid-1970s inspired his 2023 novel “ Small Mercies .”

The book is out in paperback this week. We revisit host Tiziana Dearing’s conversation with Lehane, which aired last July.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.