Marty doesn't want the attention Southie is getting because of the manifestations against desegregation, and Mary Pat is making things worse by asking too many questions in her desperate search for her missing daughter. Unfortunately, Mary Pat's desperate search puts her in the crosshairs of Marty Butler, the head of Southie's Irish mob. But as Mary Pat asks around and starts learning about what Jules was up to and where she was the last time anyone saw her, she learns they might actually be linked. These two events seem unconnected at first. That same night, a young Black man is found dead on the subway train tracks and no one knows what happened to him. One night Jules goes out with her boyfriend and a friend and never comes back home.

Her ex-husband left her, her son overdosed on heroin after returning from Vietnam, and her teenage daughter Jules is running around with a boyfriend Mary Pat hates. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in Southie, in Boston's mostly Irish-American housing projects.

In the sweltering summer of 1974, Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to get by and keep the bill collectors at bay. Dennis Lehane's Small Mercies may take place in Boston's Southie neighborhood in 1974 - but the topics it deals with are incredibly timely.Īt once a crime novel, a deep, unflinching look at racism, and a heart-wrenching story about a mother who has lost everything, this narrative delves into life in the projects at a time when the city of Boston struggled with the desegregation of its public school system - and a lot residents were showing their worst side.

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