CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE – Small Mercies

We’re all familiar with the story of American desegration in the South, but many fewer of us are as familiar with what desegration looked like in relatively “progressive” places like Boston. Hint: it wasn’t good. Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city’s desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.