Joe roams through joints, shotgun shacks, speaks, and hideouts. He drowns the reader in welcome details, from the steel barrels ordered to replace the oak ones shot up in a raid to the proper body crevice in which to hide a prison shank. Upon his arrival in Tampa, Joe is greeted by “the ships in port and the high cranes” and smells “salt and oil slicks and low tide.” Lehane is equally precise when it comes to the ins and outs of liquor distribution during the Prohibition years. Joe pulls an unsanctioned bank job so he can run away with Emma, thus setting in motion a chain of events that will affect his life’s course for the next decade - the duration of the book - taking him out of Boston to the Tampa outpost of Ybor City. His troubles begin when he meets a slinky dame from Charlestown named Emma Gould, who just happens to be the mistress of Hickey’s rival, Albert White.

Under the tutelage of a mob boss named Hickey, he branches out into armed robbery, rum running, and enforcement. Joe sets off on his remarkable career setting fire to newspaper boxes for profit. This volume centers on Joe, the baby, who defies his police chief father for a life of crime. Dennis Lehane trades on these tropes - some might say clichés - in his latest novel, “Live by Night,” the second installment in his trilogy about the Coughlins, an Irish family of lawmen living in Boston at the turn of the century. A man above the law, bound instead by family and esoteric honor, sworn enemy to stoolies and rats. Consider the mobster: a fedora, rakishly cocked.

Live by night lehane