The following post contains spoilers for Lord Have Mercy Part Four: Big Son, which you can grab here:
You can also snag the complete novel, all four installments compiled, for Kindle.
Lord Have Mercy: The Complete Novel
Barbara tipped her head, mulling it over, lips compressed. “Felix did always love that man. More than he deserved.”
Despite the action, the
romance, the shootouts, the super-secret spy ops, and the organized crime
politics, Dartmoor is, at its heart, a family story. I’ve longed maintained
that its extreme situations and heightened stakes make for interpersonal family
dynamics twice as messy and twice as engaging. It’s a club family, true, but
one populated by smaller biological families, and they deal with all the trials
and triumphs of every family, just on an outlaw scale.
Father/son dynamics have
persisted throughout the series, and in Lord Have Mercy, Mercy and Aidan
experience a role-reversal. Mercy was and still is a dutiful, devoted son, his love
for Remy the elder akin to hero worship. Aidan was – is – the eye-rolling, “ugh,
my dad’s so annoying” type of son, masking his long-held hurt with a flippant
attitude. Remy was an instructive, confidence-building father. Ghost was
impatient, snappish, and failed at every turn to show that he held any
confidence in Aidan.
Learning about Colin rattled
Mercy. Badly But over the years he’s been able to classify (while lying to
himself) Remy’s affair with Colin’s mother as a one-off. When Alex shows up, he’s
forced to face the fact that Remy, while a kind and loving father, was flawed in
ways Mercy never considered. The lifelong hero image he’s carried his whole
life shatters in LHM, and there’s no piecing it back together. In the last
chapter, when he goes to get Alex, that’s his acceptance of Remy’s gray, mortal
memory. He’ll always love his father, always carry his stories and lessons, and
he’ll never disparage him to his own children. He’s accepted that Remy wasn’t
some fairytale figure; that he wasn’t perfect. But he’s stopped – in a calm and
rational way – wanting to be just like him. When faced with undue pressure, and
crappy circumstances, Remy chose to withdraw into the swamp. To keep secrets.
To protect himself. And when Mercy’s faced with that kind of pressure, he takes
a different tack: he fights. He kills. Remy wouldn’t do anything, but Mercy
would do everything.
Driving up to Virgina, turning
up at Mike’s funeral, is his first step toward burying Remy’s ghost for good.
His dad’s long dead, and Mercy can miss him, and still love him without making
a saint of him. And he has two brothers who need him to be the man that Remy
never could be, Alex most of all.
On the flipside there’s Aidan,
whose expectations for Ghost are pretty much on the floor. They’ve made some
progress throughout the series, but when shit hits the fan in LHM, Ghost is
back to his dictatorial ways – by necessity, in Ghost’s mind. Aidan gets hit
with the one-two punch of Ghost’s “death,” and then being voted in as VP, and I
don’t think anyone – especially Aidan himself – thought he could step up. But
he does, because he always had the ability to do so. Walsh’s spiel in church
was an honest one; he really did think Aidan was the right man for the job, and
the end of the novel bears that out.
If Alex appearing in Knoxville
with Remy’s face was a shock to Mercy’s system, then Aidan’s newfound
responsibilities as VP were a dose of the same. And what does Aidan do the
second he sees a club opportunity? Exactly what Ghost always does: jumps on it
with both feet and worries about sanitizing and packaging it for the club once
he’s decided on a course of action. It’s the biggest epiphany of Aidan’s club
life, and it couldn’t have happened unless Ghost was “gone.” In Ghost’s
absence, when faced with leadership, Aidan realizes he and his dad share
similar instincts, and his eyes are opened to a whole new angle of the burden
of leadership.
In the end, Aidan doesn’t so
much forgive Ghost as come to terms with the way he is – and, perhaps, the way
he himself is. He knows that he loves his father, and now they have a platform
from which to start building their relationship anew.
On a personal development
level, with regards to individual, internal growth, this book is an important
turning point for Mercy and Aidan. A victory for both of them.
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