The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 9 May 2025
by Dennis Lehane
Boston, in the long hot summer of 1974. Richard Nixon has just resigned as President of the United States, and the city is under order to desegregate its high schools by mandatory busing of students between segregated schools in the city's most highly polarized neighborhoods, Roxbury, and South Boston (Southie). Southie is infamous for its insularity and tribalism. It is a landscape dominated by people of Irish descent (perhaps that is changing in these gentrified times in Boston?). They are a tight-knit community, known for caring about one another, and violently defending themselves. In 1974, the neighborhood was dominated by a corrupt crew run by notorious gangster Whitey Bulger, who appears in fictional form in this novel. Bulger would later be revealed to be an FBI informant despite also being guilty of ordering the murders of countless people. In August and September of that year, Boston was ripped by violent protests against the forced busing plan. The violence made national news and was largely attributed to racist anger in Southie. If you were to ask people in Southie, however, they would probably have told you it was all about being forced into desegregation by white wealthy liberals who didn't have to face the same challenges in their nice suburban neighborhoods. In the end, it was a lot about the racism. (This reader was a 4th-grader in a Boston working-class suburb at the time and the whole episode was rather frightening.)
In the foreground to all of this is Lehane's more specific tale of Mary Pat Fennessy, a woman living in the "projects" of Southie, whose daughter Julie has simply vanished on the same night that a young black man is found dead beneath a subway platform here in Southie. Her first husband was declared dead. Her son has died of an overdose after returning from Vietnam. Her second husband is estranged. Her daughter is bright and brilliant, in her eyes, and is now missing. What ensues is an epic and furious search for her daughter in which she is taking no prisoners. Her search takes her through Jules's boyfriends, assumed and actual, through their connections to various petty crimes and racist brutalities, on upward and into the underworld crime network led by Marty Butler, the local kingpin whose word is law and whose enforcement is often quite final. Mary Pat doesn't give a damn, any more, about her own safety in persuit of the truth about her daughter and, coincidentally and ultimately, who is responsible for the death of Augustine Williamson on the subway platform. The book is populated by convincing gritty characters, both weak and strong. The strongest, of course, is the gentle but honest police inspector who is looking into the whole matter. He has his sympathies for Mary Pat's plight and doesn't want to see her hurt, while knowing full well she intends to hurt others. It is a quick-moving tale, almost a parable of life in Southie in a dark and violent time.
Lehane has a gift for a highly realistic realization of these characters from this gritty Boston neighborhood. These people feel genuine, complicated, and not entirely likeable. The only one who gets of easiest is the police officer who listen's to Mary Pat's allegations and desperately, and fruitlessly, hopes she will stay out of trouble. The power and violence of the depiction suggests Lehane is exorcising some of his own demons arising from Southie and its tribalism. The fierceness of the violence almost suggests the author's own revenge against injustice and the impossible realities of political and cultural inequalities. Who's to blame him, after all?
Also by Lehane: [Mystic River]