It is a journey beset by violence, double-crossing, drama and pain. That meeting is the beginning of Joe's journey to becoming one of the nation's most feared and respected gangsters. But Joe falls in love with Emma - and his life changes for ever. A small-time thief in 1920s Boston, he is told to cuff her while his accomplices raid the casino she works for. Joe Coughlin is nineteen when he meets Emma Gould. And it is a journey into the soul of prohibition-era Ameri.

At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.Joe Coughlin is nineteen when he meets Emma Gould. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa's Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt. But life on the dark side carries a heavy price, and one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing, and enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw. Now available with a contemporary look, New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane’s epic, unflinching tale of Prohibition, the Roaring Twenties, and one man’s rise from Boston petty thief to the Gulf Coast’s most successful rum runner. “A meticulously crafted portrait of our violent national past.”- Washington Post Book World

Live by night novel