Live by Night
A Novel
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4.1 • 535 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane comes this epic, unflinching tale of the making and unmaking of a gangster in the Prohibition Era of the Roaring Twenties—now a Warner Bros. movie starring Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Zoe Saldana, and Sienna Miller.
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 city's 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 Tampa's 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Lehane (The Given Day) chronicles the Prohibition-era rise of Joe Coughlin, an Irish-American gangster, in this masterful crime epic. While most hard-working stiffs are earning their wages by day in 1926 Boston, 19-year-old Joe and his friends live by night, catering to the demand for prostitution, narcotics, and bootleg alcohol. When Joe falls for a competing mobster's gun moll, he sets in motion a chain of events that land him in prison, with the girl missing and presumed dead. In the joint, Joe meets aging Mafia don Thomaso "Maso" Pescatore, who becomes his mentor. On Joe's release, Maso sets Joe up in Tampa, Fla., as his point man. Years pass, and Joe creates a huge empire in the illegal rum trade. He marries Graciela Corrales, a fiery Cuban revolutionary, and eventually builds a life for himself in Batista's Cuba, soothing his conscience by doing good works with his dirty money. This idyllic existence can't last forever, though, especially in the night, with its shifting alliances and fated clashes. Lehane has created a mature, quintessentially American story that will appeal to readers of literary and crime fiction alike.
Customer Reviews
Good story
Interesting read but somewhat typical gangster story. Enjoyable!
Not a sequel, OK story
Lehane wrote a wonderful book in The Given Day. It is a Mitcheneresque look at a time in history when America was coming into her own. The end of the war, the end of the abuse of labor, the start of the great American middle class. A time that begat the great country and power we became by the end of the 20th century, told through the families of poor Irish immigrants and poor rural blacks. A great read with characters we cared about.
Live by Night was the highly anticipated book to pick up where The Given Day ended, until it didn't. This is a very different type of story with fleeting reference to The Given Day's story line. It is a story like Scarface about the criminal underbelly that grew as America grew but without characters that held our interest and passion.
It seems a lazy follow up to a very good novel, with a predictable storyline and finish. Lehane could do much better, has done much better than this. He started with a story that had so much promise, only to disappoint with what feels like a rush to meet a deadline.
He's a great storyteller, but this is his weakest effort to date. Hope he gets his mojo back next time. He's much better than this.
Breathtaking
I was prepared to regret buying this. Not into sympathetic gangster tales. But it was much more. Intricate, astounding prose. Great characters. (OK, totally real world improbable, although mixed with historical characters.) Couldn’t put it down.