Pun Salad

I got into reading Dennis Lehane via his private eye novels featuring gritty Boston sleuths Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. He now seems to have moved away from that series (last entry was Moonlight Mile in 2010). This one is super-gritty, it's set in 1974 Boston, and there's quite a bit of mayhem.

Via the Wikipedia page, he says this might be his final book. Apparently, an AppleTV series is in the works.

The protagonist is a South Boston woman, Mary Pat Fennessey. Southie's dysfunctions have rubbed off on her: one missing/presumed dead husband, she's divorced from another. Only one kid left, her 17-year-old daughter Jules. Mary Pat can't pay her gas bill, but she seems to have enough cash on hand to buy Virginia Slims and beer.

But it's set against actual historical background: Judge Arthur Garrity has ordered black students to be bused into lily-white South Boston High, with a proportion of Southie kids bused down to a black high school in Roxbury. And, as we remember, that worked out great, and accounts for all the racial harmony Boston is experiencing today.

Just kidding. In retrospect, it's tough to see what they were trying to accomplish. In any case, Southie's moms are up in arms, and the overtones of racism are explicit.

One fateful morning, a black kid is found dead at the local subway stop. And (not coincidentally) Jules had not made it home the previous night. As the hours and days go by, Mary Pat grows increasingly concerned, and she can't help but notice that the kids Jules was with have implausible stories about what happened. And eventually, it becomes evident to Mary Pat that the local mob is somehow involved. She's warned not to get too nosy.

That doesn't take. Eventually things get very violent as what happened to Jules gets slowly revealed.

It's a page turner. If this is Lehane's last book, I'll miss him.