Joe is 19, taking his first steps into a serious life of crime. As the main story of “Live by Night” begins, Thomas Coughlin is still an aloof high-ranking Boston police officer and a dauntingly cruel parent. Joe is one of the last remaining members of the Coughlin family, which loomed so large in the first book’s tumultuous account of 1919. This is a narrower genre piece and a Tommy-gun salute to vintage noir style. Lehane’s powerhouse “The Given Day.” That was a Boston-based historical novel of epic scope and gut-wrenching emotion. “Live by Night” is nominally a follow-up to Mr. All of “Live By Night” is written with that same degree of cleverness and care. Cryptic, doomy, romantic yet ominous, this opening salvo signals the most important thing about Mr. And you can notice that “set in motion” and “first crossed paths” are odd ways of hinting at the connection between Joe and this mysterious Emma. You can see that Joe’s life, “good or bad,” has spanned a wide moral spectrum. You can wonder what Joe did to earn himself the cement-on-a-tugboat treatment. There is an inviting degree of mystery to this paragraph full of foreshadowing. In the same paragraph he lets Joe realize “that almost everything of note that had ever happened in his life - good or bad - had been set in motion the morning he first crossed paths with Emma Gould.” “Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin’s feet were placed in a tub of cement,” Dennis Lehane writes in this perfect specimen of an opening sentence. “Live by Night” is Crime Noir 101, as taught by the best of its current practitioners.

Live by night lehane