Live by Night

Dennis Lehane has written 12 novels, at least three of which have been made into movies including Mystic River. He has done some scripts for The Wire, one of which won him an Edgar Award in 2007. I thought it was time to give him a look. Live by Night is a good read, his latest novel, published in 2012.

The novel takes during the Prohibition Era. Starting in 1926 Boston, the plot deals with mob characters, clean and dirty cops, and all aspects of booze running. The character development is excellent. The plot starts with the apparent end of the story when Joe Coughlin is about to be tossed into the ocean with his feet buried in concrete, and then the back story is told. Joe was a young hood, too smart to be doing petty crime according to two crime bosses who were in the midst of a territorial Boston war, Albert White and Tommaso Pescatore. Joe made the mistake of falling in love with White’s girlfriend, and that love haunted him over the course of the book. After being set up for an arrest after a bank heist and going to prison, Joe developed a long and trusting relationship with Pescatore, known as Maso. Once Maso and Joe were both out of prison, Joe proved his worth to Maso by developing an all-round successful crime network in Tampa. While brutal when he needed to be, Joe did not like to kill people and ran into trouble with his bosses when he found ways to accommodate the competition rather than eliminate it. In Tampa, Joe developed a relationship with Cubans, and eventually his influence extended to Havana. There are more fascinating subplots including the continued temperance movement despite the end of prohibition, and the powerful presence of the KKK in Tampa, people who were not happy about the presence of the very successful group of Italians, Hispanics, and Blacks, men who were crucial to Joe’s expanding enterprises.

There were a few moments when this book got a little slow, but not much since I read it over the course of a Sunday. I’ll be more than happy to turn pages in another Lehane book in the near future.