



After Joe robs a bank with his buddies, Dion and Paolo Bartolo, Joe tries to escape from Boston with Emma, but she double-crosses him. She turns out to be Albert's moll, but Joe commences a dangerous affair with her. Joe is captivated by Emma Gould, a lovely young woman who is serving drinks at the game. The story opens in 1926 in South Boston, where Joe and two cronies hold up a poker game, only to discover that the players belong to the gang of a powerful boss named Albert White. Set in Massachusetts, Florida, and Cuba, the novel traces the criminal career of Joe Coughlin, from his youth as a vandal and petty thief through his rise to power in the mafia. 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.Live by Night, published in 2012, is the tenth novel by Dennis Lehane, several of whose books have been made into popular films. 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. 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. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. 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. 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.īut life on the dark side carries a heavy price. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.
