A three-pronged mystery emerges: Where is Jules? What happened to the man in the station? And could the two events be related? 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.
Her teenage daughter, Jules, is all she has left. Her son died of a drug overdose after returning from Vietnam. At 42, she works two jobs and still can’t make ends meet. The protagonist, Mary Pat Fennessy, is a lifelong resident of one of Southie’s public housing projects. 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. Tensions over desegregation have reverberated through Boston ever since. Parents there mobilized against the policy, vowing not to send their children to school in September if it went ahead. 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. 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. Desiree, of course, is nothing like the sweet and simple beauty described by her father, and even Chandler would have been amazed by the plot twists that Lehane manages to keep coming.In June 1974, Judge W. Petersburg, Florida, while working the case, so the two head there to pick up a trail.
Patrick’s mentor, a wonderfully devious detective named Jay Becker, has already disappeared in St. Sacred is a dark and dangerous updating of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, as dying billionaire Trevor Stone hires Kenzie and Gennaro to find his daughter, Desiree.
Now Lehane not only survives the dreaded third-book curse, he beats it to death with a stick. His second in the series, Darkness, Take My Hand, got the kind of high octane reviews that careers are made of. Synopsis: Dennis Lehane won a Shamus Award for A Drink Before the War, his first book about working-class Boston detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. Publisher: William Morrow and Company, New York
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