Book Review: Live By Night by Dennis Lehane

Live By Night

Author: Dennis Lehane

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Date of Publication: October 2, 2012

Pages: 416 (Hardcover Edition)

     This Edgar winning novel is superb.  It transcends the mystery genre and succeeds on many levels.  First and foremost, it is a great story, expertly told.  The main character, Joe Coughlin is the youngest son of a prominent police captain.  The first part of the book is set in Boston during the 1920s as young Joe slips into a life of petty crime which escalates as he enters young adulthood.  After a two year prison stay, Joe moves on and the story shifts to Tampa, Florida.  Joe forms an alliance with Cubans, Spaniards and African-Americans to forge a crime network based on the importation of rum during Prohibition.   The final segment of the book is set in Cuba in the 1930s as American organized crime invades that island country.  Joe Coughlin is a complex character.  His many shortcomings seem to arise, in part, from his difficult relationship with his father.  There are numerous contradictions between Joe's principles and philosophy and his criminal actions.  The story weaves these conflicts and inconsistencies into a mosaic of ethical and moral conundrums.  The secondary characters are all well developed and are equally intriguing.  They include Joe's love interests, his partners in crime and his enemies.  There are many historically real characters as well. 

     The settings for this story are unique and interesting.  The descriptions of the 1920s port of Tampa and the segregated living areas are well done, as are the sketches of urban Havana and rural Cuba.  The multiple settings add another layer of interest to an already compelling story.  The women in Joe Coughlin's life also make the story sparkle.  His entanglement with a "mob moll" early on and his long term relationship with a mixed race Cuban revolutionary spice up the story immeasurably. 

      The real element that makes this novel compulsively readable, however, is the constant moral deliberations and ethical compromises which Joe and, to some extent, the secondary characters continue to confront. On many occasions he defines himself as an "outlaw" as opposed to a criminal, preferring to think of himself as "living by night, by my own rules."  

     This novel has it all: compelling and sympathetic characters, lush descriptions of unique locales, femmes fatales, action, crime, revenge and vindication.  This was one of those books I hated to finish, it was that good.  Read it and savor every page.

Book Review: The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins

The Lost Ones

Author: Ace Atkins

Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Date of Publication: December 4, 2012

Pages: 368 (Trade Paperback Edition)

     Ace Atkins is a former Pulitzer Prize nominated reporter for The Tampa Tribune who has now written eleven novels.  The Lost Ones is the second to feature Mississippi sheriff Quinn Colson, following The Ranger, published in 2011.  Both of the Quinn Colson novels have been nominated for The Mystery Writers of America's prestigious Edgar Award for best mystery novel of the year in successive years.

     Quinn Colson is a complex character.  He is a former Army Ranger and veteran of deployments in Iraq.  He returned to his hometown and became the sheriff.  In The Ranger, Colson discovers a group of extremists living in Tibbehah County, Mississippi who are running a lucrative methamphetamine production facility.  In The Lost Ones he finds an even more insidious group.  They are emissaries from a Mexican drug cartel posing as the operators of a travelling county fair.  They have infiltrated rural areas in the South and Southwest in order to procure guns and munitions for their compatriots back home.  They are also behind an appalling operation to smuggle in babies for sale.

    The Quinn Colson character is much more developed in this novel.  Through flashbacks we learn of his run-ins with the law prior to his enlistment in the Army and also the complex relationship with his younger sister Caddy.  In this book Caddy has returned home as the single Mom of a mixed race child.  She has also come home sober but with a new found religious zeal which is a bit over the top.  

     I found this book very entertaining and well written.  I think the characters are even better developed here than in the first book.  Mr. Atkins continues to describe rural Mississippi in interesting and evocative detail.  The secondary characters in this story, including an attractive female ATF agent, a corrupt former sheriff of Tibbehah and several other returned veterans of the Global War on Terror are all very compelling.  The Lost Ones is certainly a worthy nominee for the Edgar Award and I wouldn't be surprised if it is indeed the winner!  I am looking forward to The Broken Places, the third Quinn Colson novel, to be published at the end of May, 2013.