by Rachel Steinberg ’09

Dennis Lehane’s story opens with a name known to the world – Babe Ruth. The reader finds that they have been transported back to the World Series of 1918, which was split between two cities: Chicago and Boston. By some strange chance, the train carrying the players stops for a few hours in Ohio, and there Babe Ruth and his teammates play a fierce game of ball against a team of black men, led by the fastest man Babe has ever seen – Laurence Luther.

And, to their shame and fury, the white men almost lose. Right away the plot turns thick with the racism of the times, as well as the uncertainty and fear. Babe gets back on the train and exits the story for a while, but Luther’s troubles have only just begun. Meanwhile, World War I is nearing its end, and in Boston – a city swarming with immigrants, revolutionaries, communists, and ordinary citizens – Danny Coughlin, a young BPD cop, is struggling to move upwards in the police hierarchy. But when his father and godfather, two of the most powerful leaders on the force, send him undercover among his fellow cops to sabotage their attempts at forming a union, Danny is torn between his family and career and the injustices being committed against his coworkers. Luther, caught up in a crime he did not meant to commit, is forced to flee to – where else? – Boston, leaving behind his wife, Lilah, and their unborn child. He gets a job working for the Coughlin family alongside Danny’s former girlfriend, Nora O’Shea, while also becoming involved in the formation of the Boston chapter of the NAACP. Together Danny, Luther, and a cast of both historical and fictional characters must endure everything from the Spanish influenza epidemic to the disastrous Boston Police Strike of 1919. But although the action in this book never stops, the characters themselves do not take a backseat to the plot. Danny and Luther, the heroes of the story, still have many flaws and make a myriad of mistakes, and even the villains like Lieutenant McKenna and Commissioner Curtis are not painted wholly black. Within the first hundred pages, the main characters take on lives of their own. Lehane’s long-expected eighth novel investigates the pivotal events of a time in history when our nation was “at war with, and the thrall of, itself.” At times both frightening and impossible to put down, this story demonstrates how fear, hate, and love can all exist at the same time, in the same city, among very different people. In the end, however, the reader will be left with the sense that, no matter how bad the world appears to be, there is always a little hope left to fight for.

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