There’s only one tiny thing that bugged me about this book: Lehane has a Texan house painter in here who called Patrick Kenzie “y’all.” I understand that Lehane was raised in Boston and writes about mainly Boston types, so for that and because his writing really rocks in most other ways, I can cut him some slack.

I don’t know why, but “y’all” seems to be a difficult concept for northern writers to grasp and they seem to think it is mainly a word they can throw in at random as a signal to everyone that this particular character hails from below the Mason-Dixon line. Southerners never throw in “y’all” at random; the guideline for its use is simple. With first- and third-person pronouns, we have both singular and plural forms in English. We used to have singular and plural forms of the second-person pronouns as well, until “thee” fell out of favor sometime in the past 100 years or so (except apparently with the Amish and southern-revival preachers) and the second-person plural “you” came to be used for both singular and plural, except for the south, where “y’all” - a contraction of “you all” - fills in the void of the second-person plural.

So any northern writers out there—don’t y’all be distressing your southern readers by misusing “y’all”, OK?