Have Mercy

"Have Mercy" is a tumultuous love story set in 1970 San Francisco at the height of the antiwar/counterculture era. Glen, our Chicago-born white-guy narrator, meets Valerie, French/Vietnamese Eurasian 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; Valerie 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, demos, riots, suicides and much, much more. Also lots of good times: partying and sexual-revolution shenanigans and swirling weed smoke -- freakiness galore -- and on the soundtrack the outasight music of the era. But in the end it's more and more about that wild love story. For a minute things do get a bit tense. Nasty even. Or say impassioned. And then the ending itself is quite simply -- as every single reader so far has said -- double-flip gangbusters.