Best-laid plans are for wimps in Chunky giblets

Sutton, South London, 12:33PM

I tried to leave. God knows I tried. But I’m still here, and it all has to do with the fact that I spent six hours all night playing Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King on my GBA emulator. I also finished Dennis Lehane’s latest novel, the last in the Joe Goughlin trilogy, and _ SPOILERS it was such a heart-breaking end. I felt like, even though Joe was a gangster, he was also a decent man who loved his son, and it was through no real fault of his own that he was marked for death by the Mafia. It couldn’t have ended any other way, though, really, so it was a bitter-sweet ending to a fantastic trilogy of books. If you haven’t read them, by the way, I urge you to do so. Lehane is a master crime novelist, a fairly under-rated one (even though a bunch of his books were turned into movies - Shutter Island might be the most famous one). His Gennaro/Kenzie series is awesome, you love the bad characters as much as you love the heroes, and I always find myself reading from start to finish in one sitting. The Joe Coughlin series started with a novel called The Given Day, which was less about Joe and more about his family, set in the backdrop of 1910’s Boston. The head of the family is an Irish police chief, and is set during the time of the Great Depression. Boston was indeed hit with a deadly wave of influenza that took the lives of many. Whilst all this is going on, the Boston police union held a strike, which resulted in two days of pure destruction. That all actually happened, and the book felt like a historical epic more than a crime novel.

The two sequels involve Joe Coughlin, the police chief’s youngest son. They are set between the 20’s and the start of the end of WW2 respectively. Joe has shunned his family and gone into a life of crime, and that was probably the most shocking aspect of the series; that earnest young Joe, coming from a fairly well-off, if unloving, family, has become everything his father hated.

I won’t go into more detail than that, and I’ve probably said more than I should have for new readers, but I urge you to read this series. The Given Day, Live By Night, and World Gone By.

You won’t regret it.

Other news coming as I can remember/be bothered to write.