Small mercies by Dennis Lehane

South Boston in June 1974 is simmering not only in the heat but because a judge has decreed that local schools will be forced to desegregate by busing students between schools in white areas and black areas. Violent protests are breaking out everywhere. Included in the forced desegregation is Mary Pat's 17-year-old daughter Jules. They live in the Irish American enclave of Southie in the social housing projects known as Commonwealth, a self-contained world where the poor white population stick together and support one another, a world where poor blacks are not welcome. Mary Pat works two jobs and still just stays ahead of the debt collectors but the family is under the protection of the powerful Marty Butler and his minions who control the area. Her son came back from Vietnam damaged and died of a drug overdose now Jules is all she has so when she goes out one night and doesn’t come home Mary Pat starts looking. The same night Augustus Williamson is killed at a subway station in a white area and assumptions are made that as he was black he had to be a drug-dealer but Mary Pat knows he was a co-worker’s son and starts to question some of her long held racist attitudes. As she probes deeper into her daughter’s disappearance, tracking her to the same area where Augustus died, she finds those she relied on for support blocking her so she steps out on her own, even talking to a cop, Bobby Sheehan, inviting an outside eye into the neighbourhood and invoking the ire of Marty’s mob. Mary Pat is a brave mother with nothing to lose, brought up in the raw brutality of the poor area, drinking, smoking and fighting her way through life like all her contemporaries. Overlay this with the trauma of Vietnam, drugs and the disruption of the status quo and she becomes a force to be reckoned with.

Fast paced with in-your-face aggressive language, Lehane draws us into a world where the poor and the powerless are buffeted by life, surviving the violence as long as they keep their heads down and don’t make trouble. Full of rich detail, feisty characters, including Bess, Mary Jane’s 'piece-of -shit station wagon’ and a plot that thickens this is a tough read, full of violence, racism and exploitation but one which had me invested.

Themes: Racism, Murder, Revenge.

Sue Speck