Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

I saw this on Obama's reading list and it is both something I might have otherwise missed, and that I really enjoyed. It is set in Boston in 1974, President Richard Nixon has just resigned, a federal judge has ordered the busing of students to desegregate the city’s public high schools, and irate White parents are raising hell. Among them is Mary Pat Fennessy, widowed by her first husband, divorced by her second and working as a hospital aide in a skilled nursing facility. Mary Pat’s quotient of personal losses increases right away. Her only surviving child, 17-year-old Jules, fails to come home after a night out with friends, or the following day, or the day after that. As a lifelong resident of Southie, a lower-middle-class Irish neighborhood where everybody knows everybody else’s business, Mary Pat assumes it won’t take her long to piece together what happened. Yet her inquiries get her almost nowhere, and the police don’t fare much better. Then comes a complication. On the night of Jules’s disappearance, a young Black man was found dead on Southie subway tracks, his mangled body suggesting that a train ran over him, but all is not as it appears. The book deals with racism and poverty in a very effective and different way.