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.
Dennis Lehane
In the summer of 1974, a heat wave blankets Boston, and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of Southie, the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.One night, Mary Pat’s teenage daughter, Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances.The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched — asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don’t take kindly to any threat to their business.Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city’s desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.
Jimmy, Dave y Sean crecieron juntos en la sección peligrosa de Boston. Veinticinco años después vuelven a reunirse, cuando la hija de 19 años de Jimmy es brutalmente asesinada. Sean, que ahora es policía, es asignado para resolver el caso. Además de desenredar este crimen, Sean deberá estar pendiente de su amigo Jimmy, quien busca vengarse del asesino de su hija. Conectado al crimen por una serie de circunstancias, Dave se ve obligado a enfrentarse con los demonios de su propio pasado. A medida que la investigación se concentra alrededor de estos tres amigos, se despliega una siniestra historia, que tiene que ver con la amistad, la familia y la inocencia perdida demasiado pronto.
Joe Coughlin is nineteen when he meets Emma Gould. A smalltime thief in 1920s Boston, his task is to tie her up while his accomplices loot the bar she works in.But Joe falls in love with Emma — and his life changes forever.That meeting is the beginning of Joe's journey to becoming one of most feared and respected gangsters. It is a journey beset by violence, double-crossing, drama and pain. And it is a journey into the soul of prohibition-era America…