Live by Night Live by Night
Book 2 - Joe Coughlin Series

Live by Night

A Novel

    • 4.1 • 526 Ratings
    • $12.99
    • $12.99

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.

GENRE
Mysteries & Thrillers
RELEASED
2012
October 2
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
416
Pages
PUBLISHER
William Morrow
SELLER
HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS
SIZE
1.7
MB

Customer Reviews

Peter 14 ,

Good story

Interesting read but somewhat typical gangster story. Enjoyable!

Foosh9 ,

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.

XIowaNewsGuy ,

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.

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