Live by Night

⚖The case for it

Joe Coughlin starts as a small-time Boston thief who will not call himself a gangster and ends up running rum out of Ybor City, and a critic calls him “one of the more compelling characters ever created by Lehane.” The opening Boston chapters hook readers inside two chapters. The research is specific rather than atmospheric: bootlegging economics, immigrant labour, Irish and Italian rivalry, the racial politics underneath all of it. The dialogue carries long stretches of plotting. Readers describe “indelible images the reader owns and feels,” where “scenes breathe, characters grow.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Once the book moves to Tampa it settles into territory Boardwalk Empire and The Godfather already worked, and readers say those chapters “read like Hollywood cliche.” The terse Lehane voice softens in the back half around Joe’s relationships, to the point one reader says he was replaced “with a sentimental hack.” The supporting cast stays flat while period detail crowds them out, “weighed down by too much lovingly researched period detail.” A multi-year jump kills the momentum, and the close is “a breathless compression of too many events” where “the wrap up was very weak.”

— the honest librarian

9h

honest hours

13

sittings