I didn't it was possible, but this installment of The Boston Saga was even more downbeat and depressing than the last one.

Booze, drugs, guns, mobsters, and now the IRA have got involved. Just another day in 1950's Boston.

Boston August 1954 - Temperatures in the high 90's and it's so hot, your clothes stick to your skin. Bad-tempered drivers yelling at people. Red Sox put up a dismal display against the Yankees at Fenway Park.

Boston August 2018 - Temperatures in the high 90's and it's so hot, your clothes stick to your skin. Bad-tempered drivers yelling at people. Red Sox put up a dismal display against sweep the Yankees at Fenway Park.

I have to smile while I'm in Boston during a heatwave, and reading a book set in Boston during a heatwave, but unlike the book's protagonists, at least my A/C is working, and as an added bonus, I'm not being shot at or beaten up by mobsters. 

Crossing invisible borders between neighborhoods, he looked over the rooftops of the brownstones and tenements at the blue-white, cloudless sky. Boston was not a town of tall buildings and arcing skylines, but of neighborhoods tightly packed and closely linked - if not by tenderness then by history, and each neighborhood emerged as distinctly, proudly its own.

Two crew members dressed in oilskins and carrying guns, brought the man out onto the deck. He was similarly dressed but a smear of blood glistened on his face and his legs were bowed as if from a length of time kneeling. His hands were bound behind his back and he was gagged with a kerchief soaked with paraffin oil. His eyes were wide in his bloodied face as he struggled against his holders. Pushing and pulling, they walked him to the stern, turned him so that he was facing south against the railings, the way they'd come, pressing into the morning tide.

Beneath the boat's props the sea churned blackly. He had a moment to consider this and the intermittent, sweeping light cast by the lighthouse on Minot's Ledge and the clanging buoy of the eastern marker as they entered the waters of the bay, and he suddenly, urgently spoke aloud the Act of Contrition....

And that's where I got jolted right out of the story. In the previous paragraph, he was gagged. So how come he's suddenly able to speak?

What's funny is that there is one of those phantom margin-scribblers at large in this book, but they missed this one.

Book 2 in the Boston Saga takes place in July. So rather than biting cold, a shit-ton of snow, and woefully crap Bruins, I'm assuming this one will have relentless heat and dismal Red Sox. Welcome to Boston.