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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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By J. Courtney Sullivan

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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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clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

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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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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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

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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

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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.

Goldberg’s most recent book is the story collection “The Low Desert: Gangster Stories.”

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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.

Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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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

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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Novel 'Small Mercies' illuminates a turbulent period in Boston's history

• Carol Iaciofano Aucoin

As we’ve been reminded more than ever during the pandemic, you only get one set of high school years. As we’ve also been reminded by countless “Best of” lists ranking Massachusetts high schools, not all schools offer the same quality of education.

The state of American education has been in the news a lot recently, but we can look to history for a deeper understanding of the issues in modern schooling. Nearly 50 years ago, busing — a way to desegregate schools by transporting students between white-majority schools and Black-majority schools — threw school inequality into high relief in many Boston neighborhoods.

Dennis Lehane’s new novel “ Small Mercies ” explores the massive upheaval caused by Boston’s 1974 court-ordered busing. The novel is Lehane’s 14th work of fiction, the latest in a long and rich line of novels, historical novels and literary crime novels.

The court order impacted many Boston schools, but those in the largest white-majority and Black-majority neighborhoods were South Boston High School and Roxbury High School. “Small Mercies” is explored primarily through the lens of South Boston residents.

The busing order by U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr. took effect in September 1974. “Small Mercies” takes place during the last sweltering weeks of summer in the run-up to the first day of school. Against the backdrop of busing, “Small Mercies” also contains a crime, which drives much of the action in this riveting, harrowing tale, and helps to lay bare the era’s embedded racism and its corrosive class differences.

Mary Pat Fennessy, a resident of Southie’s public housing, has problems beyond busing. The wages from her two jobs are not keeping up with her gas or electric bills, and her 17-year-old daughter Jules has not returned from a recent night out. The same night Jules did not come home, there was a horrific incident at the Columbia subway station; newspapers reported that some white teens chased a Black teen onto the tracks, resulting in his death.

It turns out the Black teenager was the son of Dreamy Williamson, a fellow healthcare aide at the nursing home where Mary Pat works. Dreamy is one of the few Black people Mary Pat has direct contact with. And even though Mary Pat carries all the prejudices of her neighborhood (“White broads from Southie aren’t friends with Black women from Mattapan”), she likes Dreamy.

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.

Mary Pat is one of those characters. Over the course of the novel, she reconsiders many of her beliefs about herself, her former husband, her neighborhood and her views on race — all the while retaining her fierce nature. She’s ashamed to admit that part of her feelings about Black people is a “grubby desperation” to “feel superior to someone. Anyone.”

She experiences these changes while she’s literally on the move, digging ever deeper into the mystery of her daughter’s disappearance. As the days go by without a word from Jules, Mary Pat asks more and more questions around the neighborhood, stepping into territories closely held by two very different groups: the police investigating the subway crime and the local gang that runs Southie.

The Butler gang, which contains some alarmingly bloodless characters, is so woven into the neighborhood they help residents attend a huge anti-busing rally at Boston City Hall Plaza. This was an actual event, and Lehane vividly portrays all its outsized emotions, from the speakers who whip up the crowd to Senator Ted Kennedy getting shouted off the stage to the anti-busing chants that devolve into ugly racist chants.

But “Small Mercies” is too nuanced a novel to just show the loud surface. So much of the story flows from the maddening powerlessness over their lives that the Southie residents keenly feel. Mary Pat sees the double-frame of school clashes between poor white people and poor Black people while in the suburbs, it’s schoolyear as usual.

This being 1974, the Vietnam War still looms large, and Mary Pat, whose own family was deeply impacted by the war, is well aware that the same Boston neighborhoods that sent the most boys to Vietnam are now the ones clashing about busing. “They keep us fighting among ourselves like dogs for table scraps so we won’t catch them making off with the feast,” she says.

Mary Pat forms a kind of friendship with Detective Bobby Coyne, one of the cops assigned to the subway crime investigation, and whom she’s hoping will help find her daughter. She had hoped that the Butler crew, guys she’s known all her life, would help her find Jules, but she’s met with a surprising silence, which makes her press harder.

Coyne grew up in nearby Dorchester but still considers Southie “unknowable.” In a novel that revolves around the benefits and drawbacks of a tight-knit community, showing Southie from both inside and outside proves very effective. An unlikely duo, Coyne’s and Mary Pat’s conversations provide some of the novel’s most philosophical and bittersweet high points. Coyne is in awe of Mary Pat, who is both “broken but unbreakable.”

Lehane, who grew up in Boston, threads the story with local details that now belong only to history: the afternoon edition of the Herald American, Ned Martin broadcasting Red Sox games on WHDH, Chet Curtis co-anchoring the evening news on WCVB TV. People get groceries at Purity Supreme and buy clothes at Zayre or Jordan Marsh (depending on their income).

But 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. Given that this is 1974, no one in the novel talks or thinks with any degree of political correctness. The author fully writes out offensive words and descriptions and uses them often, and because of that, the story feels truer.

No one book can contain all of the complexity of the busing years, but with “Small Mercies,” Lehane has opened an illuminating window on one neighborhood caught in one of the most turbulent periods in Boston’s history.

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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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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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"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

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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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In Dennis Lehane’s latest novel, ‘Small Mercies,’ a Southie woman searches for her missing daughter in a Boston on the brink of change

On a sweltering Boston morning during the summer of 1974, Mary Pat Fennessy, a lifelong resident of Southie’s public housing projects, checks on her sleeping teenage daughter, Jules, and lights a cigarette. Mary Pat’s been working beyond overtime at two jobs — as a hospital aide in an old folks home, and at a shoe warehouse — but she’s still behind in payments, and her gas has been cut off (“she still has three more shifts and a trip to the billing office before she can boil water or roast a chicken again”). Within minutes, she also has to field one of her neighborhood “protectors,” Brian Shea, whose dapper ways of dressing belie a life of gangsterism and violence. Brian drops by with leaflets for Mary Pat to distribute, ahead of the upcoming anti-busing rally. Many residents of Southie are ferociously against the impending start of public-school desegregation, and tempers are running atmospherically high.

Then, two things further disrupt Mary Pat’s life: Jules goes missing after a night out with her dubious friends, and a young Black man is discovered dead at a local train station. That news story, as Mary Pat reads it in the paper, “doesn’t say anything about the dead black guy being a drug dealer, but it’s a pretty safe assumption, or otherwise why would he be there? Why come into their part of town? She doesn’t go into theirs ... She stays on her side of town, her side of the…line, and is it too much to ask that they do the same? Why do you have to antagonize?”

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That ingrained racism, passed from generation to generation, runs like an elemental fuse through Dennis Lehane’s latest novel, “Small Mercies.” Casual — and not so casual — bigotry marks the conversations that Mary Pat has as she navigates her relationships with co-workers, friends, and community members. Pursuing her daughter’s disappearance, she’s confronted by unwelcome realizations and revelations; in one particularly transfixing scene, she speaks with her ex-husband, Ken Fen, a gentle giant of a man who was ultimately embarrassed by Mary Pat’s capacity for hate. In general, throughout the community, it seems that there’s a sense of dis-ease, of things on the cusp of transformative change, and a frustrated and furious pushback against that. “‘I’m just mad,’” says one character, “‘and I don’t even know why.’”

During her search, Mary Pat also slams into an unyielding wall when it comes to the hypocrisy, pettiness, and small-mindedness that insistently insular communities tend to generate. Two women-led Southie groups, Restore Our Alienated Rights — ROAR, formed by a Boston School Committee member to protect the “vanishing rights of white citizens” — and Southie Women Against Busing, or SWAB, haven’t merged “because Carol Fitzpatrick, the leader of SWAB and Louise Day Hicks, the leader of ROAR, hate each other, dating back to some spat they had in kindergarten. Rumor has it the source of the lifelong animosity is a broken crayon, but that’s never been confirmed.”

Mary Pat, a Southie chick through and through, is the primary engine driving this story: she’s had her share of monumental grief; she’s also been raised to tough things out. But pivotal to the tale as well is Detective Michael “Bobby” Coyne, a Vietnam vet steeped in compassion, who is investigating the young Black man’s death. Even for Bobby, who is from a neighborhood mere miles from Southie that’s just as white and Irish, Southie has a different feel to it: “Every guy has a thousand-yard stare. Every woman has an attitude. Every face is whiter than the whitest paint you’ve ever seen and then, just under the surface, misted with an everlasting Irish pink that sometimes turns to acne and sometimes doesn’t. They’re the friendliest people he’s ever met. Until they aren’t….”

Coyne is observant, perceptive, and thoughtful, and, even while making his way through a community seething with deeply entrenched rage, still capable of hope and romantic love, and just as capable of recognizing the origins of the damage he sees. At a certain point, Mary Pat recognizes it too: “’When you’re a kid…they start in with all the lies,’ she tells Bobby. “‘And you spread the same lies….you keep repeating the lies until you wear [your kids] down. That’s the worst of it — you wear them down until you scoop all the good out of their hearts and replace it with poison.’” It’s a realization that galvanizes her into deeply unsettling action.

As always, Lehane is terrific at finely drawn character sketches thrumming with both immediacy and humor. The kaleidoscope of portraits running through “Small Mercies” is by turns funny and chilling, whether it’s Mary Pat ruminating on the presence of Jules’s boyfriend, Rum, “who, like his father and uncles before him, has the conversational skills of a baked ham….”, or Mary Pat running into an acquaintance at the local bar: “Mary Pat has known Tina since kindergarten, though they’ve never been close. Tina has always made Mary Pat think of a walnut. As something hard and curled into itself, dry and difficult to break.”

Stemming from Lehane’s childhood memory of being confronted with an anti-busing protest in Southie, and riven with violence, “Small Mercies”' story turns just as insistently on a stream of resonant and varying perspectives, perceptibly changing the story’s progress and — echoing its title — slipping in, here and there, tiny but meaningful vestiges of hope.

SMALL MERCIES: A Novel

By Dennis Lehane

Harper, 320 pages, $30

Daneet Steffens is a journalist and critic. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @daneetsteffens.

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Small Mercies Summary & Study Guide

Small Mercies Summary & Study Guide Description

The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Lehane, Dennis. Small Mercies . HarperCollins, 2023.

In the summer of 1974, a woman named Mary Pat Fennessy struggles to juggle her responsibilities as a single mother with the gathering unrest of the desegregation busing crisis in South Boston. Mary Pat's daughter, Jules, goes missing on the same night that a Black man named Auggie Williamson (whose mother, Calliope, works with Mary Pat) is found dead on the train tracks at Columbia Station. Mary Pat contacts her sister, Big Peg, whose daughter informs Mary Pat that Jules was last seen spending time with Rum Collins, George Dunbar, and Brenda Morello, the latter two of whom are known to be involved with Marty Butler's crew, a criminal organization that runs South Boston. When Mary Pat fails to get a straight answer about Jules' whereabouts out of either George or Rum, she gets in touch with an old friend, Brian Shea, who also works for Butler, and asks him to locate Jules, which he promises to do. Mary Pat visits her ex-husband, Ken, and insults him when she discovers that he has begun dating a Black woman. When Brian fails to find Jules by his promised deadline, Mary Pat goes to his house and learns from Brian's wife that Jules has been involved with a hard-edged Butler crew member named Frank Toomey.

Two detectives, Bobby Coyne and Vince Pritchard, come to Mary Pat's house and ask her questions, which she cautiously answers because she is angry with Brian. That night, she goes to the Fields, the Butler crew's hangout, and directly confronts Brian, who warns her not to draw attention to the Butler crew and chastises her for going to his house and speaking with the police. After Mary Pat leaves work the next day, she is confronted by Marty Butler himself, who hands Mary Pat a payoff and suggests she leave the state; she realizes that her daughter has been killed. Meanwhile, Coyne and Pritchard learn that Augustus was chased into the train station by four youths and mortally wounded before he was ever thrown onto the tracks. Coyne decides to make arrests, but is unable to get any information out of Brenda and Rum before Marty Butler's lawyers swoop in and ferry them away.

After several days of drinking and grieving, Mary Pat is brought to an anti-busing rally by several members of an organization called SWAB (Southie Women Against Busing), but destroys her standing in the South Boston community when she gets into a fistfight with one of the SWAB members, Joyce, after Joyce tries to hit her daughter Cecilia. Mary Pat heads home, digs up her husband's old kit bag, and resolves to resort to vigilante justice. She intercepts Coyne outside of his police station and implies that she intends to torture the people involved in Jules' death for information before passing that information on to the police; though Coyne cautions her against doing this, he does not stop her. Mary Pat spends the evening stalking Rum, then threatening him with castration if he does not speak to the police. Rum goes to the station and explains to Coyne and Pritchard that he, Brenda, George, and Jules were indeed responsible for Auggie's death. When Coyne and Pritchard press him, Rum admits that Frank Toomey was involved in the murder as well, and that he was angry with Jules because she had become pregnant with Frank's child and was threatening to tell people about it.

Mary Pat orchestrates a theft of George Dunbar's supply of drugs in order to locate him and begin tailing him, a decision that leads her to Roxbury, where she watches George exchange a bag of guns furnished by the Butler crew for more drugs with a group of Black men. Mary Pat follows George home, forces him to use his own supply of heroin before interrogating him and learning that Brian and Frank buried Jules in the concrete basement of the house behind the Fields. Mary Pat then handcuffs George to her car, drives him out to a pier, and calls Coyne to come arrest him. That night, Mary Pat sets the Fields and the adjoining house on fire before informing Coyne that Jules' body is in the basement; after Coyne locates the body, he has Mary Pat identify it, then learns from her that George was spotted giving weapons to a group of Black men in Roxbury. The next day, Mary Pat learns that Auggie's funeral is being held in Mattapan and decides to attend; at the wake, though, Auggie's parents (Calliope and Reginald) inform Mary Pat that they consider her responsible for their son's death and threaten to hurt her if she does not leave the neighborhood.

Coyne leads a raid on the Global Liberian Liberation Front, the name of the group that George was seen giving guns to, and learns that Marty Butler instructed them to initiate a race war by opening fire on groups of white students. Meanwhile, Mary Pat manages to locate Frank Toomey at an anti-busing rally and follows him across Boston before finding him outside his house, incapacitating him, and dragging him into her car. She takes him to Castle Island and interrogates him for some time before Marty and his men arrive. Coyne gets a call from Pritchard and rushes a team of police to Castle Island to try and head off the confrontation there. Mary Pat manages to kill Frank and take Brian hostage before Marty and his men corner her and Brian and kill them both. Frank and his men are arrested (though Coyne doubts they will be charged), Mary Pat's funeral is sparsely attended, and Calliope manages to make peace through a conversation with Mary Pat's ex-husband Ken.

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Small Mercies: A Detective Mystery Kindle Edition

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 307 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date April 25, 2023
• File size 3501 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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

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

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

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

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0B7NDZNDV
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper (April 25, 2023)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 25, 2023
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 3501 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 307 pages
• #6 in British & Irish Literary Fiction
• #33 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
• #51 in Historical Thrillers (Books)

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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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