I thought that Dennis Lehane's The Given Day would be more of a baseball book, as I'm a big fan of the nation's pastime. However, Babe Ruth figures into the story only tangentially as a means of helping to set the stage—Boston, as WWI is drawing to a close, and Prohibition is on its way. This book is a nice blend of fact and fiction, and the facts are more engrossing than the fiction. Boston at that time was a city in trouble, anxious to blame just about everything on the Communists, except perhaps the flu epidemic, and by the end I felt as if that had happened a couple of books ago. The family histrionics are fairly predictable, with the bad son (Connor), the good son (Danny, our hero), and the young son (Joe). Of course, Mom and Dad have their heads in the sand and think that the good son is really the bad son and vice versa. There's also Eddie, who came over on the boat from Ireland with Dad and is evil personified. Dad and Eddie are cops on the take, and Danny, also a cop, gets involved with unionizing the police force. Then there's Luther Laurence, a black man on the run from the law. Even with all these cops around, only Eddie knows of Luther's past, and it is information that he uses for his own vile purposes.
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