I really enjoyed this book. Although the book was not extremely long, I felt like I really got to know the characters. When reading this it felt a lot like reading the Godfather. I also find the time period of this book quite interesting - such a 'crossroads' period for our country's history.

I have seen other comments that people didn't like the main characters. Which I understand, but I appreciate the complexity of the characters. Like so many great characters in literature and film history, Coughlin is mix of evil and good which I think is one of the underlying themes in the novel.

I've heard bad things about the movie, but I would definitely recommend this book.

1930'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.