Have Mercy (Paperback or Softback)

Have Mercy is a tumultuous love story set in 1970-71 San Francisco at the height of the antiwar/counterculture era. Glen, our Chicago-born white-guy narrator, meets Valerie, French/Vietnamese Eurasian poet and granddaughter of a French colonial governor of Vietnam, at a "Human Chain to Stop the War." Sparks fly. Values clash. Glen and a friend start up an underground newspaper near a huge Bay Area air base that serves as the major transshipment point for Vietnam. Val joins the fray. All sorts of hot-button issues, both personal and societal, get pushed and pounded. Stuff happens! Government surveillance, phony traffic stops and drug busts, factional tensions, family uproars, racial incidents, feminist and gay protests, strikes, demos, riots, knife attacks, suicide attempts and much, much more. Also lots of good times: partying and sexual-revolution escapades -- freakiness and kinkiness galore (sexual explicitness warning right here) -- and all this amid a whole lotta swirling weed smoke, and on the soundtrack the outasight (most definitely not to say outa-hearing) music of the era. But in the end it's more and more about that wild love story. For a riveting minute things do get a bit tense. Nasty even. Or say impassioned. And then the ending itself is quite simply double-dip gangbusters with a buncha cherries on top. And swaddling those, a squirt or two of, yes, MERCY. To savor!