Coughlin Trilogy

About the Coughlin Trilogy series

The Coughlin Trilogy is Dennis Lehane's sweeping departure from contemporary Boston crime fiction into twentieth-century American history, following the Coughlin family -- Irish-American, Boston police -- and in particular Danny and later Joe Coughlin across three decades of Prohibition, organised crime, and social upheaval. The Given Day (2008) opens with the 1919 Boston police strike and the influenza pandemic, weaving Babe Ruth and real historical figures into a story about labour, race, and the limits of loyalty. Live by Night (2012) follows Joe Coughlin's rise from small-time Boston hood to a major rum-running gangster in Prohibition-era Tampa and Cuba, and won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. World Gone By (2015) closes the trilogy in 1943, with an older, more compromised Joe Coughlin navigating wartime Florida as an aging crime boss.

Each novel is a complete, satisfying story in itself, but read together they form a multi-generational portrait of American ambition and violence that Lehane researched as heavily as any of his crime fiction, grounding the fictional Coughlins in real Prohibition-era and Depression-era history.