Dennis Lehane Reveals Cover, Synopsis of His Next Book

Images via Dennis Lehane on Facebook

For the first time on Tuesday, Dorchester-bred author Dennis Lehane, creator of such fan favorites as Mystic River, and Gone, Baby, Gone, revealed the cover for his upcoming novel, World Gone By, which will cap off a three-part series started in 2008 based on separate characters from the same Boston family.

A follow-up to The Given Day, about the city’s police strike in 1919, and Live by Night, which tracks the rum trade from Cuba to Florida during Prohibition, Lehane announced that his new novel will hit store shelves and Amazon Kindle on March 10, 2015.

The author promises the book, set during World War II, will pack a plotline heavy on “blood, crime, passion, and vengeance” as it takes readers from Cuba to Ybor City, Florida, with its focus on the novel’s protagonist, Joe Coughlin.

Here’s the synopsis:

Ten years have passed since Joe Coughlin’s enemies killed his wife and destroyed his empire, and much has changed. Prohibition is dead, the world is at war again, and Joe’s son, Tomás, is growing up. Now, the former crime kingpin works as a consigliere to the Bartolo crime family, traveling between Tampa and Cuba, his wife’s homeland.

Like the other two novels in the collection, World Gone By relies on historical facts meticulously researched by Lehane in order to create his fictional landscape. World Gone By, which bills its lead character as a “master who moves in and out of the black, white, and Cuban underworlds” as he “mixes with Tampa’s social elite, U.S. Naval intelligence” and crews of mobsters, will recreate a war-torn country in a post-Prohibition setting.

Lehane promises bookworms that they’ll be flung into the center of epic gun duels, witness corruption at the hands of the government, and get dragged through a “heartbreaking climax ending” that takes place in a Cuban sugarcane field.

Back in April, around the time of the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings, Lehane started an online auction to have a character in his next book named after the highest bidder. The money raised—it cost Dorchester resident Mary Crowe around $2,600—went to the Richard Foundation, a nonprofit organization formed after eight-year-old Martin Richard, also of Dorchester, was killed in the April 15, 2013 bombings on Boylston street.

After winning, Crowe submitted her nephew’s name for consideration. Lehane’s assistant said Crowe’s nephew will be a character in World Gone By, but he doesn’t know in “what capacity” just yet. Calls to Crowe were not immediately returned.

In a previous interview with Boston, Lehane, who recently released The Drop along with a screen-adaptation of the book, said this would be the last readers will likely see of the Coughlin family. From here, the scribe has plans to write other Boston-centric books for an entirely new trilogy set in the present day.