Coughlin Books in Order

The broader Coughlin series traces one Irish American family across some of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century, from the end of World War I through Prohibition and into World War II. Lehane uses the Coughlins to explore how power, policing, labor, and organized crime bleed into one another in Boston and far beyond.

The Given Day starts it off in 1918, when Aiden “Danny” Coughlin is a patrolman in a Boston Police Department that hasn’t had a raise in more than a decade. Danny’s father is a celebrated captain, his younger brother is a rising prosecutor, and Danny is asked to infiltrate radical labor groups just as the city is boiling over. In a parallel story line, Luther Laurence, a Black ballplayer on the run from violence in Tulsa, ends up working in the Coughlin household, bringing issues of race and class uncomfortably close to the family table.

That novel charts the run‑up to the 1919 Boston police strike, when patrolmen walked off the job and the city descended into chaos. Danny is pulled between loyalty to his fellow officers, ambition inside the department, and his growing belief that the people patrolling Boston’s streets deserve a fairer deal. The choices he makes ripple through the family for decades.

In Live by Night the focus tilts to Danny’s younger brother, Joe, who rejects both the badge and the straight life in favor of the bootlegger’s road. The story follows his climb from small‑time robberies in Boston to running liquor and nightclubs in Tampa and Havana, mixing gangland politics with love stories, betrayals, and brushes with real historical figures.

World Gone By brings the saga into the 1940s. Joe is older, nominally retired from hands‑on crime, and serving as consigliere and fixer for the same networks he once helped build. When he learns there is a price on his head, the book becomes a tight, almost claustrophobic look at how a man who has profited from violence tries – and fails – to keep that violence from swallowing his son and his few remaining friends.

Across the three books, the Coughlins move from beat‑cop row houses to boardrooms and palatial winter homes, but the tension stays the same: who gets to wield power, and what it costs the people underneath. Labor protests, race riots, the rise of federal law enforcement, and shifting criminal alliances all pass through the family’s hands. It’s historical fiction built from street‑level detail rather than lectures, always coming back to the private bargains people make when the law and justice part ways.

You can read each volume independently, but following them in order lets you watch the family evolve from policemen to kingpins to uneasy elders of a world they helped create, even as that world leaves them behind.