Live by Night
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Boston, 1926. The 20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world. Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police
… More »Boston, 1926. The 20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world. Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the citys most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw. But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one--neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover--can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt. Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampas Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.
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Add a Commentit's a nice follow up to Given Day, which is one the best I've ever read. The character development of Joe is what kept me turning pages more than the plot.
Well written mystery story of the development of a curiously likeable gangster during prohibition. I read it over a period of a day as I couldn't put it down.
Not a book I can really recommend. After the first 100 pages or so, I just started flipping though the rest of the pages and reading a bit here and there. I got the drift and don't think I missed anything too important. I was very disappointed in the end. The book started at the end but it didn't end at the end. In other words, you never find out why the character is in the predicament in which you find him at the start of the story, or if, in fact, he is actually in that predicament at all! The writing style made me tired-the author spends paragraph after paragraph telling us minutia that we don't really need to enjoy the story. I have read other things by Lehane that were much better than this one.
The book was okay – but not one of my favorites.
Will speak on Thursday, November 29 as part of the Author Talk Series http://www.bpl.org/news/author_series.htm
No heroes here but Lehane makes his ganster stars slightly more than one dimensional. I found the historical detail the most interesting part.
I should preface this by saying that I admire some of Mr. Lehane's previous work very much; his detective series and Mystic River are wonderful and his characters really do come alive. His past work clearly shows that he is a very talented writer. I bought a pre-publication advance copy of Live By Night at a yard sale a couple of weeks ago - and now I know why they got rid of it so quickly. I thought this book was truly awful. None of the characters rang true - not one - and neither did large portions of the story. Some of it was simply ridiculous - an example (spoiler alert): a 1930's explosive device the size of a 'child's shoe box' filled with 'ball bearings, brass doorknobs and gunpowder.' This bomb was built in a day by a person conveniently and almost-magically available, put in place by another wonderfully conveniently-situated person (but with no explosives experience), where it then blew a 30 ton (!) engine completely through the hull of a ship. This and several other implausible plot details and/or unbelievable coincidences really detracted from the story. Based on this book, I think Mr. Lehane is probably better suited to keeping his stories within a more contained, small-scale present-day universe rather than this attempt at a grand historical extravaganza. Read his other books instead.
This is not Lehane's best work.
Read after The Given Day
Pennie Clark Ianniciello, Costco's book buyer, has chosen Live by Night by Dennis Lehane ( as her pick of the month for October 2012.