Book Review: World Gone By

We will be reviewing World Gone By by Dennis Lehane and even though it is set ten years after Live by Night, you don’t have to read the first two books in the series.

Joe Coughlin is known by many as a respectable businessman in Tampa Bay and is known to donate to charity a lot. Joe is also on good terms with the crime family headed by his former partner Dion Bartolo. He uses his influence to help his former partners out and is known as the ‘golden goose’ in circles.

When Joe learns that a hit put on him from a stranger he doesn’t know, he becomes paranoid. He can’t sleep anymore and decides to find the person that is supposed to kill him before the date of his hit. That means Joe has to use everything at his disposal including his former crime partners to ensure his and his family’s safety.

Books like this one are interesting because you have been giving a plot device that may or may not be real. However, this plot device is going to to shape the rest of the novel. Joe acts like any rational person when they know that someone is out to kill them but unlike most people, he has close ties with a crime family. And the question that you are trying to solve is why does someone want him dead?

As you may have noticed, I love crime novels and mafia books when written well. Lehane’s previous novel Mystic River was great and it is hard to tell that it is the same author. World Gone By is fast paced and would make a great action movie. I would recommend it to fans of crime novels and good mystery novels.