11/1/2022 0 Comments Live by night book summary![]() ![]() 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. But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. ![]() 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. 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. Power, lust and moral ambiguity combine for an all-American explosion of fictional fireworks.A group of Boston-bred gangsters set up shop in balmy Florida during the Prohibition era, facing off against the competition and the Ku Klux Klan.īoston, 1926. Live by night book summary series#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. 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. Its protagonist is Joe Coughlin, the morally conflicted youngest son of a corrupt Boston police official. Though this novel serves as a sequel to The Given Day (2008), it can be read independently of Lehane's previous historical novel. 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. This is an utterly magnetic novel on every level, a reimagining of the great themes of popular fiction-crime, family, passion, betrayal-set against an exquisitely rendered historical backdrop. ( Starred review.) Lehane’s novel carves its own unique place in the Prohibition landscape. Lehane has created a mature, quintessentially American story that will appeal to readers of literary and crime fiction alike. This idyllic existence can’t last forever, though, especially in the night, with its shifting alliances and fated clashes. ![]() 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. Years pass, and Joe creates a huge empire in the illegal rum trade. On Joe’s release, Maso sets Joe up in Tampa, Fla., as his point man. In the joint, Joe meets aging Mafia don Thomaso “Maso” Pescatore, who becomes his mentor. 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. 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. meticulously crafted portrait of our violent national past.īestseller Lehane ( The Given Day) chronicles the Prohibition-era rise of Joe Coughlin, an Irish-American gangster, in this masterful crime epic. With its fresh, precise language, its acute sympathy for the passions that shape-and sometimes warp-its central characters and its lovingly detailed recreation of an earlier age, Live by Night transcends the familiar and assumes an unimpeachable reality of its own. In Lehane's hands, however, it becomes something larger and infinitely more complex. Reduced to a bare-bones summary, Live by Night might sound like the sort of standard crime saga we've all encountered far too many times. Live by Night is Crime Noir 101, as taught by the best of its current practitioners. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |