Le Silence

 [a:Dennis Lehane|10289|Dennis Lehane|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1227580381p2/10289.jpg]'s [b:Small Mercies|61812308|Small Mercies|Dennis Lehane|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1675645342l/61812308.SY75.jpg|97027640] is a decent enough book, but I found myself wishing it were better. The first third is strong in it's descriptions of character, time, and place. The small anachronisms (1959 Ford Country Sedans were station wagons and didn't have trunks) don't detract too much.
 It is, by the way, more of the grimmest novels out there.
9:30

Dennis Lehane goes deep and furiously into the corrupt and racist world of 1974 South Boston during the school busing crisis. Desegregation of Boston schools has been declared and the residents of very white and very Irish Southie are not happy about having black kids in their schools.

Mary Pat Fennessey's daughter Jules gets caught up in the anti Black sentiment which leads to the death of a young Black man in a subway station and she goes missing. Mary Pat learns that Jules has been palling around with members of Marty Butler's criminal racketeering gang (Butler being a thinly disguised Whitey Bulger) and her instinct to find her daughter and exact revenge is ferocious. Mary Pat is one of the fiercest female protagonists I've ever run across, but along the way she starts to come to an understanding of the false premises that precipitate racism. In the end she is a sympathetic character.

For the first 120 pages or so of this book, I was disappointed and tempted to stop reading. It was more wooden and cliched than I'd expect from this author. Then policeman Bobby Coyne goes to his first Narcotics Anonymous meeting in a long time and I was hooked (no pun intended). At last the rich, gritty, and well, yes, masculine sensibility that I associate with Lehane was churning, as it did for the rest of the story. Coyne is a charismatic character who develops a relationship with Mary Pat in the course of his investigation. He struggles with his own Boston Irish history, but he had better parenting and some success in moving past it: "There were only two big sins in the house on Tuttle Street -- feeling sorry for yourself and racism, which when you think of it are two sides of the same coin."

I lived in Boston in 1974 and remember the racism and violence, and the shame that came with living in a city that is supposed to be a cradle of liberty but was so brutally divided. Small Mercies captures the tense atmosphere in the city at that time. The racist slurs and anti Black behaviors of some of the characters are uncomfortable to read but important reminders of why we need to make sure we never go back to that place.