Live by Night

Starred review from August 6, 2012
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. Agent: Ann Rittenberg, Ann Rittenberg Literary.

May 15, 2012

A New York Times best-selling author with multiple awards to his name, Lehane sets his latest in Roaring Twenties Boston, Florida, and Cuba; it's no surprise that the promotion brings up HBO's Boardwalk Empire. Youngest son of an upright Boston police sergeant, Joe Coughlin opts for the dark side, working his way to the top of organized crime but also setting himself up, inevitably, for betrayal and revenge. With a one-day laydown on October 2 and a 400,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2012

Lehane (Mystic River; Shutter Island) is known for gritty, occasionally gruesome mystery novels, frequently set in the working-class Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, where he grew up. Like his The Given Day, this new book represents something of a departure for Lehane. Both are historical novels, following the history of the Coughlin family in Boston between the two world wars. While the first novel offered a complex narrative thread and examined the lives of multiple characters, Lehane focuses here on Joe Coughlin's rising career as a gangster and rum runner. Joe is the younger brother of Danny Coughlin, the protagonist of The Given Day, who appears only briefly here, and Joe's exploits effectively illustrate how Prohibition boosted the fortunes of gangsters like Danny. VERDICT Lehane continues to evoke beautifully the world of Boston in the 1920s. The narrative falters and loses focus somewhat in the novel's second half when the setting shifts to Florida and Cuba. The novel also suffers from its almost exclusive focus on a single character. While not on the level of its predecessor, it still provides sufficient action to entertain most fans of historical fiction and mystery. [See Prepub Alert, 4/23/12.]--Douglas Southard, Boston

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2012
The acclaimed mystery writer again tries his hand at historical fiction, combining period detail from the Prohibition era with the depth of character and twists of plot that have won him such a devoted readership. Though this novel serves as a sequel to The Given Day (2008), it can be read independently of Lehane's previous historical novel and is closer in its page-turning narrative momentum to his more contemporary thrillers such as Mystic River (2001). Its protagonist is Joe Coughlin, the morally conflicted youngest son of a corrupt Boston police official (oldest brother Danny was protagonist of the previous novel and makes a cameo appearance here). One of the more compelling characters ever created by Lehane, Joe is a bright young man raised in an economically privileged Irish household who turned to crime as a teenager because "it was fun and he was good at it." He's the product of a loveless marriage, for whom "the hole at the center of his house had been a hole at the center of his parents and one day the hole had found the center of Joe." Among the ways he tries to fill that hole is through love and loyalty, both of which put him at odds with the prevailing ethos of the gang bosses among whom he finds himself caught in the crossfire. He ultimately builds a bootlegging empire in Tampa, backed by a vicious gang lord whose rival had tried to kill Joe, and he falls in love with a Cuban woman whose penchant for social justice receives a boost from his illegal profits. ("Good deeds, since the dawn of time, had often followed bad money," writes Lehane.) Neither as epic in scope nor as literarily ambitious as its predecessor, the novel builds to a powerful series of climaxes, following betrayal upon betrayal, which will satisfy Lehane's fans and deserves to extend his readership as well. Power, lust and moral ambiguity combine for an all-American explosion of fictional fireworks.

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Starred review from September 1, 2012
Lehane's latest historical thriller, following The Given Day (2008), continues the author's propulsive narrative train ride across twentieth-century American history. This time the train stops during Prohibition, and the individual focus is on Joe Coughlin, a Boston cop's son by birth but a gangster by choice, rejecting his father's platitudes about crime not paying and choosing, instead, to live by night, in a world without netsnone to catch you and none to envelop you. Joe begins in Boston, and after a stint in prison, it's off to Tampa, where he quickly becomes the crime boss of Ybor City, rum-running capital of Florida. Joe, like Vito Corleone, is a thoughtful gangster, a family man who would prefer to do business without violence but who draws violence to him like a magnet. Despite evoking comparisons both to The Godfather and to the TV series Boardwalk Empire, Lehane's novel carves its own unique place in the Prohibition landscape, partially because crime runs at a more languid if no less lethal pace in Ybor City than it does in the North. And, somehow, when the staccato rhythm of gunfire overwhelms the tranquil tempo of a slowly turning ceiling fan, the jolt to our system is stronger, as is the realization that Joe's worlds of night and day are held together by the thinnest of fibers. This is an utterly magnetic novel on every level, a reimagining of the great themes of popular fictioncrime, family, passion, betrayalset against an exquisitely rendered historical backdrop. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Note to that big IT department in the sky: add bandwidth, launch satellites, do whatever you need to do to prepare for the digital promotion campaign that will accompany the launch of Dennis Lehane's new novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)