World Gone By - by Dennis Lehane

I don’t usually blog about two books in a row.  But, this is summer and my hands are never empty when there’s a good book around.

Dennis Lehane’s tale of wartime gangsters in Tampa falls into the page-turner category.  World Gone By reads like a well done TV series.  Think of the Sopranos, or Boardwalk Empire. Complex characters.  Twists and turns that sugarcoat nothing and make it hard to sleep.

It’s 1943 and Joe Coughlin is a fish out of water, but essential to the mob’s operations in Tampa and Cuba.  Yep, he’s Irish and from Boston, but he has a knack for making money.  Heaps of it.  That makes him important to his Italian-American bosses and gets him a place on the Commission, where every important decision, from business to killing is made.

He’s safe, right?  No longer.  Somebody, for reasons unknown, has threatened his life, or at least that’s the rumor.  It’s a rumor loud enough to get his attention.

Complications drive a plot and give depth to characters.  In Joe’s case, the complications run in his veins, right back to his childhood.  His background and choice of professions, and ability to keep the cash flowing make him “one of us.”  At the same time, being a non-Italian keeps him outside the fold.

With a Lehane book (Shutter Island, The Drop, Mystic River) nothing is ever exactly as it seems.  World Gone By is an onion begging to be peeled chapter by riveting chapter.  Friends are friends, or are they?  Enemies?  Friends?  Hard to tell.  What day is this?  Mutations occur with every passing hour.  It’s like trying to keep up with a basketball game when every player wears a different color jersey and shoots at both nets.

Lehane added something more.  He carefully hid a morality play inside a crime novel.  Everyone’s actions have consequences, even yours and mine.  The characters in this book wrestle with deeds done and undone, just as much as we do.  The ‘business’ is important.  Friends are more important.  Family is the most important, except perhaps when money steps in.

But, Joe has a quick mind.  He’s a member of the walking dead, sudden resurrected.  Wait a minute.  Nothing’s settled.  He has to protect those he loves and to do that he must first protect himself, while keeping his value among stone cold associates.  Feed and water the tigers, but don’t get forget they are tigers.

Edgy is not a word I use carelessly, but World Gone By is a razor that you have to balance on, even as the blade cuts into your feet.

You like gangster books and films?  Don’t miss it.  You’re more attuned to morality plays?  Don’t miss it.  You just like a good story?  Lehane never, but never disappoints.

Hungry for more?  The Given Day, and Live By Night are two previous Joe Coughlin novels.