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In Dennis Lehane’s Boston, Hope and Hate Are Black-and-White Issues

Lehane’s new novel, “Small Mercies,” sets a crime story against the backdrop of the city’s school busing battles of the 1970s.

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SMALL MERCIES, by Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane spares nothing and no one in his crackerjack new novel, “Small Mercies,” which may be his last.

That prospect is terrible news for admirers of his crime fiction, which like “Les Misérables” elevates misdeeds to the heights of human drama and art. But Lehane has long worked on film and television projects and now plans to do that full time. He’s said this one might be the “nice mic drop” that ends his publishing career.

Read him while you can.

“Small Mercies” is set in 1974 Boston on the eve of mandatory school busing, but — like so many period pieces — it’s as much about the present as it is about the past. It zeros in on bigotry that ought to feel dated but doesn’t: White, Irish American South Boston is up in literal arms about integration. A young Black man can die just for wandering into the wrong place.

Lehane rarely narrates from a female point of view. But his main character this time, a bruiser named Mary Pat Fennessy, is something else. “This is a woman we’re talking about?” one incredulous guy asks. “Project chick from Southie” is the answer. “They breed them a little different there.”

That’s a huge understatement about Mary Pat, a once “cute” blond 42-year-old who is dead broke, has two failed marriages behind her, lost a son first to Vietnam and then to heroin, loves to brawl and smells of stale beer. Her reflection in the TV screen shows her “a creature she can’t reconcile with the image she’s clung to in her mind, an image that bears little resemblance to the sweaty lump of matted hair and droopy chin dressed in a tank top and shorts.”

Lehane doesn’t introduce characters; he jump-starts them. So we meet Mary Pat at what will be a turning point in her life: the day her 17-year-old daughter, Jules, goes out with friends and doesn’t come back. By apparent coincidence, the nursing home co-worker whom Mary Pat thinks of as her one Black friend is also about to lose a child: Her son, Augustus Williamson, turns up dead in a train station. His mother soon drops out of sight too.

Lehane’s language about these events is so unsparing it has shock value. It’s not quotable here. The white characters’ mildest thought is that the dead kid must have been a drug dealer, and it gets uglier from there, as Lehane draws on every vicious, bigoted slur he must have heard growing up in Dorchester.

He provides the savage body language to match. Within a week of Jules’s vanishing, Mary Pat has twice beaten up her daughter’s boyfriend, who “has the conversational skills of a baked ham.” Her basic game involves punching, biting and head-butting. By the second encounter, she’s holding a box cutter to his scrotum.

Even if “Common Ground,” J. Anthony Lukas’s magisterial nonfiction account of racial attitudes in and around Boston, gave you some idea of how provincial and hidebound the area’s neighborhoods once were, Lehane’s evocation is still joltingly fierce. It’s as hard-hitting as his particular brand of optimism, which regards racism as a form of self-pity and hope as perhaps the opposite of hatred.

“Those who are abandoned grow vengeful,” he writes at one point. That thought applies to every figure in this book’s vibrant landscape. It’s the same view that elevates his best books — “Mystic River,” “Gone, Baby, Gone,” “The Given Day,” “World Gone By” — to an elegiac level of heartbreak.

All of those books, like this one, rely on bitterly fraught situations — here, the Boston Irish publicly spit at Senator Edward Kennedy for supporting busing — not to mention sharp colloquial dialogue, propulsive plotting and scaldingly memorable secondary characters.

Of course, those are the same traits that also elevate good screenwriting. “Small Mercies” was written during the pandemic, while Lehane’s attention was mostly focused on the Apple TV+ prison drama “Black Bird,” which so clearly bears his imprint. He has another series in the works there and a full lineup of future screen projects.

He has been outpaced only by Stephen King in his ability to write for television without compromising his literary career. George Pelecanos and Richard Price — collaborators on “The Wire,” as Lehane was — have all but stopped trying. So if it’s unrealistic to hope he has more books in the offing, it’s hard to come away from “Small Mercies” without wanting more.

He does wrap this one up with genuine closure and a surprising toast between the story’s most symmetrical figures. But if his last words in a novel turn out to be these, so be it: Here, he writes, is “life in all its highs and lows, all its dashed dreams and surprising joys, its little tragedies and minor miracles.”

As epitaphs go, you could do a lot worse.

SMALL MERCIES | By Dennis Lehane | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | 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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New York Times Bestseller

by Nora Roberts ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2024

A touching story of love and grief ends in an epic battle of good versus evil.

Roberts’ latest may move you to tears, or joy, or dread, or all three.

Every summer, John and Cora Fox visit Cora’s mother, Lucy Lannigan, in Redbud Hollow, Kentucky, leaving their children, 12-year-old Thea and 10-year-old Rem, for a two-week taste of heaven. The children love Grammie Lucy far more than John’s snooty family, which looks down on Cora. Lucy, a healer with deep Appalachian roots, loves animals, cooks the best meals, plays musical instruments, and makes soap and candles for her thriving business. Thea—who’s inherited the psychic abilities passed down through the women of Lucy’s family—has vivid magical dreams, one of which becomes a living nightmare when a psychopath robs and murders John and Cora as Thea watches helplessly. Thea’s description of the killer and her ability to see him in real time help the skeptical police catch Ray Riggs, who goes to prison for life. Although Thea and Rem go on to have a wonderful childhood with Grammie, Thea constantly wages a mental battle with Riggs, who tries to use his own psychic abilities to get into her mind. Over the years, Thea uses her imagination to become a game designer while the more business-minded Rem helps manage her career. Thea eventually builds a house near Lucy, where a newly arrived neighbor is her teen crush, singer-songwriter Tyler Brennan. Tyler has his own issues and is protective of his young son but slowly builds a loving relationship with Thea, whose silence about her abilities leads to a devastating misunderstanding. At first Thea tries to keep Riggs locked out of her mind. As her powers grow, she torments him. Finally, she realizes that she must win this battle and destroy him if she’s ever to have peace.

Pub Date: May 21, 2024

ISBN: 9781250289698

Page Count: 432

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024

ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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ONE PERFECT COUPLE

by Ruth Ware ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2024

The most cinematic Ruth Ware novel so far.

A reality TV paradise becomes a nightmare for the show’s unlucky contestants.

Lyla Santiago and Nico Reese have been dating for more than two years, and she’s beginning to feel like their relationship may be hitting a wall; she loves him, but his main focus at 28 is on his acting career, while, at 32, scientist Lyla is starting to dream about settling down. When Nico pleads with her to join him on a new reality TV show, One Perfect Couple , Lyla views it as an opportunity to see whether their relationship can go the distance—in reality as well as on TV. They arrive on a remote Indonesian island to find blue waters, white sands, romantic huts, and eight other contestants, all beautiful, glamorous, and clearly committed to bolstering their visibility by competing on the show. The director seems a bit shady; he insists (as their contract demands) that they turn in all electronics, plies them with booze, and then leaves with the crew—and the first ousted contestant. That night, a huge storm sweeps across the island. The next morning reveals a fatality among the wreckage: a hut and its inhabitant have been crushed by a tree, and the outbuildings have been destroyed. The remaining contestants are cut off from all communication, with the exception of one radio, and there is a very limited supply of food and water. So Love Island becomes Survivor , and one person in particular is set on being the last person standing. Ware offers another take on the locked-room mystery, but this time, her focus is less on creating a creepy atmosphere of dread, as she did in earlier novels, than on showing the absolute brutality of which some humans are capable. But she still has a good time herself: There’s a funny self-referential line to an earlier novel, plus some female characters MacGyver-ing a battery. The prolific Ware continues to stretch herself, taking on something new in each novel and writing strong—and increasingly kick-ass—female characters.

ISBN: 9781668025598

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024

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

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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.

Dennis Lehane on writing, family and his new novel, ‘Since We Fell’

May 19, 2017

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.

Review: Forget Chinatown, Jake: Tod Goldberg’s ‘The Low Desert’ finds noir in L.A.’s far outskirts

A new collection from author of dark tales Todd Golberg trades urban L.A. noir for the more sprawling menace of the Inland Empire and other exurbs.

Feb. 26, 2021

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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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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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.

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

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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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Book review: lehane exposes racism and hate in 1974 southie in ‘small mercies’.

After 13 best-selling thrillers, Dennis Lehane’s words have been missing from novels for the past six years; his last thriller “Since We Fell” was in 2017. Instead, Lehane turned his attention to film and TV, writing for “The Wire,” “Mr. Mercedes,” among others, and the Golden Globe–winning crime drama miniseries “Black Bird,” which he created. Lehane’s novels also have been turned into solid films such as “Gone, Baby, Gone,” “Mystic River,” “Shutter Island” and “The Drop” (2014), based on his short story “Animal Rescue.”

With the outstanding “Small Mercies,” Lehane returns to novels, using a region that he knows well — South Boston. As is Lehane’s style, “Small Mercies” is an unsentimental view of the area known as “Southie,” an in-depth examination of the very flawed residents and an unflinching look at the violence that erupts. Lehane tells the story of real people, embracing their failings and imperfections — many imperfections — but also offering a semblance of hope. It’s hope that doesn’t suggest a happily ever after ending, but hope that there is a future and it will be better.

Set during the summer of 1974, “Small Mercies” captures the time that Boston’s public schools were court-ordered to desegregate with the beginning of student busing. The court order sparked protests, rallies and riots that, in “Small Mercies,” are organized by mob boss Marty Butler and his associates.

That background allows Lehane the opportunity to examine deep-seated racism that permeates the neighborhood. While the protests occupy the residents and criminals, 42-year-old single mother Mary Pat Fennessy is more concerned that her 17-year-old daughter, Jules, is missing. Jules is the reason Mary Pat gets through each mind-numbing day. “It is her belief that Jules was the best part of her. That Jules was better” than her first husband who died, than her son, who overdosed shortly after returning from Vietnam, and her second husband who recently left her.

Jules’ disappearance coincides with the death of a young Black man, whose body was discovered in a nearby subway station, “the dividing line between Southie and Dorchester on the eve of busing.” Mary Pat begins her own investigation into Jules’ disappearance, regardless of the harm it may bring to the neighborhood or herself.

Rage and hate consume Mary Pat, who directs her feelings for just about everything and everyone — the desegregation order, her neighbors, her job and the violence that so causally infiltrates Southie meted out by brutal people she has known all her life. This is the life she inherited and she is realizing she may have passed these “hand grenades of hate and stupidity” on to Jules.

Lehane delivers an uncomfortable, engrossing look at the destructive nature of racism and hate in an intimate plot. “Small Mercies” centers on Mary Pat but its themes go beyond her.

“Small Mercies” may have a second life as, according to several reports, Lehane is creating a series based on the novel, among other projects.

Listen to the author

Spend a virtual evening with Dennis Lehane discussing “Small Mercies” in conversation with author Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”) at 8 p.m. April 25 through Coral Gables’ Books & Books partnering with Miami Book Fair and other bookstores across the country. Ticket is $30, which includes a copy of “Small Mercies.” Visit booksandbooks.com/event for more information.

Oline H. Cogdill can be reached at [email protected] .

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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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Carol Iaciofano Aucoin Book Critic Carol Iaciofano Aucoin has contributed book reviews, essays and poetry to publications including The ARTery, the Boston Globe and Calyx.

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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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"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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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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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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What's it about, amazon editors say....

This missing person story slash '70s-era race reckoning in Boston is infuriating, thought-provoking, and even darkly comical.

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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

• 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
• #7 in British & Irish Literary Fiction
• #47 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
• #61 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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Small Mercies

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Book Review: Emil Ferris tackles big issues through a small child with a monster obsession

Emil Ferris follows up her visually stunning 2017 debut graphic novel with its concluding half, “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book 2.”

There are two types of monsters: Ones that simply appear scary and ones that are scary by their cruelty. Karen Reyes is the former, but what does that make her troubled older brother, Deeze?

Emil Ferris has finally followed up on her visually stunning, 2017 debut graphic novel with its concluding half, “My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Book 2.” It picks up right where Book 1 left off (spoilers for Book 1 … now), with 10-year-old Karen in a fever dream as she processes her mother’s death from cancer and the revelation that she had another brother named Victor before his twin Deeze killed him.

For the uninitiated, the story is essentially Karen’s diary as she dons a detective hat and oversized coat to solve mysteries — like who killed the upstairs neighbor and where her emaciated classmate disappeared to — in 1968 Chicago , featuring historical events like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and Vietnam War protests. Karen, a monster-loving Catholic school student who identifies more with werewolves than with girls, sketches her experiences in lined notebooks. She has an astounding ability to capture people — a technically skilled artist who also sees through her subjects and depicts their nature alongside their features. And she’s gay, something her beloved Mama definitely did not approve of and which she must now reconcile with the society she lives in.

“Monsters” may be narrated by a kid, but it is definitely an adult book with adult language and themes. Ferris raises complicated issues ranging from the patriarchy’s role in homophobia and America’s role in eugenics to the merits of capitalism, socialism and communism. Along with why school sucks.

And I cannot give Ferris enough accolades for acknowledging the depth of children, who often see and understand more than most adults want to admit.

Ferris revels in gray areas and often calls taboos and moral lines into question, using Karen’s elementary-age perspective as an opportunity to see people not as their profession, race or sexuality, but as people — or, in any case, monsters, but equalizing regardless.

Although Book 2 has an introduction and brief callbacks to remind readers who’s who and what happened, it’s really best to read or reread Book 1 first. There are tons of characters at play and it’s a multi-faceted story that requires deep reading. The recaps are decent reminders, but they can’t possibly capture the nuance from Book 1 in just a page or two.

If Book 2 seems almost too familiar, that’s because it follows the same basic plot arc as Book 1, even down to starting and ending with wild dreams. But unlike its prequel, the plot jumps around with considerably more frequency and suddenness. Ferris leans on her readers to read between the lines and apply the same techniques for viewing her art that her characters use when they visit the Art Institute of Chicago .

“Monsters” is an incredible feat of both storytelling and artistic achievement that makes for a brag-worthy coffee table art book, as well as a compelling story with a seriously intense moral and philosophical workout. Ferris is a must-have for any comic-lover’s collection.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

Journal of Materials Chemistry A

Polythiophene and its derivatives for all-polymer solar cells.

All-polymer solar cells (all-PSCs), employing conjugated polymers for both polymer donors and acceptors within the active layer, offer numerous benefits, such as outstanding mechanical flexibility, device longevity, and suitability for roll-to-roll manufacturing processes. Recently, polymerized small molecule acceptors have emerged as pivotal contributors to the advancement of all-PSCs, particularly in enhancing power conversion efficiencies. Nevertheless, the quest for high-performance and cost-effective polymer donors for all-PSCs persists, presenting a bottleneck in the broader-scale production of all-PSCs. Polythiophene and its derivatives (PTs) have garnered renewed attention owing to their simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and scalability. The development of PTs-based all-PSCs stands as a promising avenue toward achieving high efficiency, low cost, and enhanced stability in organic solar cells. This review centers on PTs-based all-PSCs, elucidating the design principles of polymer acceptors compatible with classic P3TH and outlining strategies for novel PTs to attain high efficiency. Additionally, we offer comprehensive insights into device optimization strategies and discuss the parameters pertinent to PTs-based all-PSCs, with the aim of advancing research in this promising field of renewable energy.

• This article is part of the themed collections: Journal of Materials Chemistry A Emerging Investigators 2024 and Journal of Materials Chemistry A Recent Review Articles

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Q. Bai, W. Wang, Y. Cheng, J. Chen and H. Sun, J. Mater. Chem. A , 2024, Accepted Manuscript , DOI: 10.1039/D4TA02245A

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