From New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane comes this epic, unflinching tale of the making and unmaking of a gangster in the Prohibition Era of the Roaring Twenties--now a Warner Bros. movie starring Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Zoe Saldana, and Sienna Miller.
Meticulously researched and artfully told, Live by Night is the riveting story of one man's rise from Boston petty thief to the Gulf Coast's most successful rum runner, and it proves again that the accolades New York Times bestseller Lehane consistently receives are well deserved. He is indeed, "a master" (Philadelphia Inquirer) whose "true literary forefathers include John Steinbeck as well as Raymond Chandler" (Baltimore Sun). And, "Boy, does he know how to write" (Elmore Leonard).
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Add a Comment1930's gangsters--not for the squeamish, but very good. Read this one before you read Lehane's "World Gone By."
I read to page 25 and then gave up. It was just not my cup of tea. Set during Prohibition, it was too much like historical fiction, which I do not like, but I also found all of the characters unlikeable. However, I really love most of Lehane's other books, like "Mystic River", "The Drop", and the entire Kenzie/Gennaro series, and I highly recommend those.
A few pages in, I realized I'd read the book before, but by then I was hooked and read it again, it was that good. The world of criminals during prohibition is much like the world of traffickers today - all about greed, and living for the moment. Though today, they don't live as long.
Regrettably Lehane seems to have run out of steam with this one. The premise is fine but what should have been an historically based organised crime thriller just dissipates within irrelevant minutae. The implausibility of some of the plot development is also a strike against this otherwise gifted author.
The first book by Dennis Lehane I've ever read which I didn't enjoy.
A 'gritty' story of a dark era in American crime.
Well told, and with a romantic twist that has a sad ending.
Ranks with 'The Godfather'.
it's a nice follow up to Given Day, which is one the best I've ever read. The character development of Joe is what kept me turning pages more than the plot.
Well written mystery story of the development of a curiously likeable gangster during prohibition.
I read it over a period of a day as I couldn't put it down.
Not a book I can really recommend. After the first 100 pages or so, I just started flipping though the rest of the pages and reading a bit here and there. I got the drift and don't think I missed anything too important. I was very disappointed in the end. The book started at the end but it didn't end at the end. In other words, you never find out why the character is in the predicament in which you find him at the start of the story, or if, in fact, he is actually in that predicament at all! The writing style made me tired-the author spends paragraph after paragraph telling us minutia that we don't really need to enjoy the story. I have read other things by Lehane that were much better than this one.
The book was okay – but not one of my favorites.