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 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. 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. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. 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.Īs 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. 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. 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.īut 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. Kenzie and Gennaro know the local hoods and toughs because they went to school with them. The best known of those books, “ Gone, Baby, Gone” (1998), was adapted for the screen by Ben Affleck in 2007. 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. For the crime novelist Dennis Lehane, southern Boston is a muse, but for his characters it’s more of a curse.

Sacred by Dennis Lehane