World Gone By - Tapa dura

The best gangster novel since The Godfather. Terrific story, shattering conclusion (Stephen King)

This is a book that should put [Lehane's] name right up there where it belongs, right up there alongside Doctorow and Dreiser (Scotland on Sunday)

This is noir with added value: Lehane is terrific on family ties and at conveying the buzz of a city powered by immigrant labour of often dubious legality (Guardian)

Lehane's tough, muscular prose captures the era well; and his dialogue brings to life the inhabitants of its underworld (Spectator)

This is not just brilliant period crime writing but brilliant writing full stop (Independent)

Sophisticated, literary and barbed enough... it makes this book a sentence-by-sentence pleasure. You are in the hands of an expert. And you'll know it (Scotsman)

A masterpiece by the crime writer's crime writer, this is the finest novel of the year with a spare, stark edge that cuts into your very soul . . . No one captures menace quite as elegantly as Lehane, nor understands the mob better . . . Boardwalk Empire on speed (Daily Mail)

Dennis Lehane just keeps getting better . . . a lost America of sharp suits and sharpshooters brilliantly to life (Mail on Sunday)

A pure, hard example of the gangster genre, its moments of violence gleaming like sun-bleached bone . . . it's the moral conflict raging within Coughlin that makes this book so satisfying (The Herald)

Echoes of The Godfather abound, but between the mob showdowns you are reminded too, of literary novels tracing a man's inexorable advance towards death . . . impressive (Sunday Times)