Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Live By Night tells a broad, sweeping tale that stretches from 1926 to 1935, and from Boston to Tampa, Florida and on to Cuba. It includes a number of historical figures as well as fictional characters and follows the story that Lehane began several years ago in The Given Day. At the center of the story is Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of Boston police captain, Thomas Coughlin. The Coughlin home was not a happy one, at least not for young Joe, who early on amused himself by doping out the combi...
I think Dennis Lehane may be a big fan of Boardwalk Empire based on this book.In the mid-1920s, Joe Coughlin is a young man who has turned against his upbringing as the son of a legendary Boston police captain. Joe works for a local gangster and does the occasional robbery on the side. When he falls for the mistress of a rival to his boss, trouble follows, and Joe’s criminal career takes a turn that eventually finds him setting up a huge bootlegging operation in Tampa.This is an indirect sequel
It is a tale as old as time itself: boy meets girl, boy loses girl; but this time the boy is a small-time robber and the girl is a crime boss' girlfriend.It is a tale as old as time itself: a young man fights to earn a fortune, earns it, but in the end (view spoiler)[loses the woman he loves most (hide spoiler)].Live by Night reads like a coming of age story of a young man who lived with his small-time-crook-buddies in the Prohibition Era. I do need to complain that from time to times the 20 and...
Well, it started out very nice but it felt like Lehane gave up 2/3 through. And then the wrap up was very weak. I saw it immediately and it was so disappointing. If you notice I have given nothing of the story away, I'm speaking of style and development. The story had it's moments that were very delightful but they fell short with lack of believability (I hate it when that happens!). The character development I've grown accustomed to Dennis Lehane novels was only half way there (so maybe my expe...
This book started with good promise. Joe was an interesting character operating in a vividly described 1920s Boston. His father was chief of police. As you might expect in Lehane novels, Joe was a criminal protagonist.Lehane does a good job of exploring father/son conflicts, and extends the family theme into Joe's criminal decision making. Unfortunately, the latter two thirds of the book in Tampa read like Hollywood cliche.
I’m addicted to Lehane’s storytelling skills, and this book supplied me with a good fix. As with Stephen King, people can debate all they want about where Lehane fits in the scheme of lasting literature, but I don’t care for that subject. I get pleasure from his ability to draw me in with complex characters I care about and to engage me in their development as they walk the line between the darkness and the light. I also appreciate his non-flashy prose, which works effectively and almost invisib...
When Joe Coughlin was starting out in the crime business, his boss would say to him. “The people we service? They visit the night. But we live in it. They rent what we own.” Live by Night is the second book in Dennis Lehane’s historical fiction Coughlin trilogy. While not nearly as commanding as his first, The Given Day, it still packs a punch. Many, many punches. And shots. And other things that go bump in the night.In The Given Day, Joe is just a minor character, a boy in the shadow of his old...
"This writer's got this"...It's nice as a reader when you realize that and can sit back and enjoy the story. Dennis Lehane is a writer who will put you in that easychair.Live by Night was my first Lehane and midway through the first chapter I knew I was in safe hands. His writing flows, it touches on all the plot's necessary points and no more. Scenes breathe, characters grow, and the story seldom slows down. This may not be a 5-star book for everyone. I'm giving it an extra bump up for the cont...
Coughlin book No. 2. The youngest of the Coughlin brothers makes a life in the world of organised crime in Tampa and Cuba - but this is in the days, when no one can make any real big moves without gaining interest from the Klu Klax Klan and the... American Italian... Mafia!This second book in this astounding historical organised crime drama straddles the genres of the historical drama focused The Given Day and the all-out crime drama World Gone, and as a result leaves it a bit short for both gen...
The opening scene of Dennis Lehane’s Prohibition gangster tale, Live by Night has our hero, Joe Coughlin, on a tugboat, in the Gulf of Mexico, fitted for a nice set of cement footwear, while a dozen or so of his least favorite people prepare to help him into a final swim. It is from this moment that we look back over the years to 1926 to find out how Joe came to be in such peril. The first thing we see is Joe and two other petty crooks robbing a speakeasy owned by a Boston gangster. During the c...
There’s an element that bugged the heck out of me all the way through this novel, so let me just get it out of the way and move on, since this was a read I really enjoyed. Despite the abundance of ideas in Live By Night, ideas which relate to the story’s era and setting: the futility of Prohibition, Jazz Age excess, bootlegging and gangland violence, racism, the Cuban émigré community in Florida - the main character, Joe Coughlin, isn’t given any real purpose or object to pursue. What are the mo...
Little Joe Coughlin was only a bit player in The Given Day, but here he gets an entire novel all to himself. It's not necessary to have read The Given Day first. Live By Night makes a fine stand-alone novel. If you have read The Given Day, it will give you some understanding as to why Joe has chosen a career as a criminal. He was the neglected, often invisible youngest son. He observed how his father and brothers worked hard and lived within the law, and they were not rewarded for their pains. S...
Naturally all the reviews I read on this site praised the author and the novel. This is standard for every review. Reader tells what the story is about and then say what a great book it was and what a great writer the author is. I have no idea what they got out of the book. There is nothing specific except what the book is about. It's unfortunate that readers are not educated enough to explain what it is about a book that they like or maybe dislike.I've read all of Lehane and find him to be a be...
"I don't understand," Danny said softly."I know you don't," Joe said. "You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy's leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there's a difference, like the banker's just doing his job but the loan shark's a criminal. I like the loan shark because he doesn't pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be sitting where I'm sitting ri...
IMDb - Screenplay based on Dennis Lehane’s novel "Live by Night" movie released January, 2017 - staring Ben Affleck (RottenTomatoes.com - Audience score 3.1 / 5)I liked the book more than the movie. Other Dennis Lehane movies based on his books, "Shutter Island", "The Drop", "Gone Baby Gone", "Mystic River") Youtube - Live by Night Movie trailerOne of my favorite actors - Ben Affleck By 1926, Prohibition, gangsters & corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, son of Boston police captain, leads "organized
LIVE BY NIGHT was the first Lehane book I've read and it won't be the last. This book almost reads like historical fiction. Excellent characters and a very engaging story. Great novel.
A completely new setting for a Lehane novel for me. It starts in Boston, but spends a lot of time in Florida & even Cuba. An excellent adventure in Prohibition with great characters. A lot of close calls, sad deaths, & justice occasionally happens. Can't count on that, though. Lehane's novels are as bad as life in that respect.I wish I hadn't listened to this before the first one, but I didn't think I had that. This contains a lot of spoilers so I don't even want to listen to that one now.
-May 2013 Awarded Edgar Award for Best Novel-This tale chronologically tells of the rise of a main protagonist Joe, a cops son, to a position of command of many men who partake in things of an illegal criterion. Badabing badaboom with nostalgia, a different time in history more godfather like in its climb and battle to keep power but Joe started up with no Kin in-crime, his father was a cop so he had maybe you could say a slight disadvantage to make his name in fireworks but this fact could hold...
My sincere thanks to William Morrow who provided an advanced reading copy of Live by Night which will be published October 2012. If you look back at my book shelf you'll see I really loved Dennis Lehane's The Given Day. What I can't quite figure out is why I didn't write anything about it at the time. I thought I had. Regardless, when given the opportunity by William Morrow Publishing to read Live by Night, I was thrilled.Live by Night is being called The Given Day #2 and does continue the story...
This is disturbing. Somebody has kidnapped terse, cynical, grimly funny Dennis Lehane, the guy who wrote a series of excellent Boston detective novels, and replaced him with a sentimental hack who writes sentences like this:"He was starting to suspect he was in love with her. In those rare moments when the cage opened and he was invited in, he found a person desperate to trust, desperate to love, hell, desperate to live She just needed to see he was worthy of risking that trust, that love, that