Onyx reviews: Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 04/02/2023

The Irish-American Southie region of Boston is already a powder keg awaiting a spark in the summer of 1974. The city is in the midst of a heat wave and the public school system is about to undergo court-ordered desegregation. There will be rallies protesting the latter that will no doubt explode into violent riots as tempers flare and racial tensions reach the boiling point.

This is the backdrop against which Lehane tells a more personal story. Mary Pat Fennesy is a single mother who has already lost one child—her son died from a drug overdose after he returned from the police action in Vietnam. Now, her 17-year-old daughter has gone missing after a night out with some questionable friends.

No one is willing to give Mary Pat a straight answer about what Jules was doing that night. The people she was supposed to be with provide conflicting stories. Someone says she went to Florida, which is enough for the police to dismiss her as a runaway. They have real crimes to solve and prevent.

On the same night Jules was last seen, a young Black man died under mysterious circumstances at a subway station in a white neighborhood. It's tempting to write off his death as being drugs-related, but Mary Pat worked with his mother and doubts he was involved with drugs. It begins to look more and more like a broken-down car left him stranded outside of his safe zone and someone (or some group) decided to take action against him. That group may have included her daughter.

Mary Pat knows that nothing happens in the neighborhood that mob boss Marty Butler doesn't know about, so she pleads for his help in locating Jules. He's supposed to be the neighborhood protector, after all. Mary Pat has a short fuse, though, which makes Butler nervous that her relentless pursuit for information will draw unwanted attention to his illicit businesses. He tries to placate her, but she's having none of it, turning into a determined vigilante who will stop at nothing to find the truth. The only police officer willing to help her tries to counsel patience, but Mary Pat is on fire...and soon the whole neighborhood might be, too.

Small Mercies could serve as a bookend to Mystic River. In that earlier book, it is a mobster who loses a daughter to crime and moves heaven and earth to find the culprit, making mistakes and missteps in his blind rage. Mary Pat doesn't have appearances to keep up and has little to lose, so she is much more audacious than the characters in Mystic River were.

Mary Pat isn't perfect—and neither was her daughter, Jules. Long-hidden racial biases emerge as the tension over integration comes to a head, and Mary Pat is as guilty of blind hatred as many of her neighbors. The book's title is more ironic than literal—there has been very little mercy in Mary Pat's life and she does not intend to grant mercy to those who have wronged her.