Lehane’s large-canvas historical yarn steers a twisted and intriguing course through a post-World War I America that’s preoccupied with racism, sports and fear of communist incursions, beset by disease and divided by class. In these pages, he tells of Luther Laurence, a young black man who falls in with the wrong crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and flees both murder charges and a pregnant wife, landing in Boston and the employ of the Coughlin family. The Coughlins aren’t long off the boat from Ireland, but they’ve established themselves within the local police ranks. In addition to Laurence, Lehane focuses here on idealistic cop Danny Coughlin, the rising son of an influential police captain, who supplies the principal window through which we witness the misnamed “Spanish flu pandemic” of 1918; the Wilson administration’s campaign against radicals; and the notorious 1919 Boston Police Strike. There’s so much story in The Given Day, that the reader may have trouble keeping a handle on it all. But Lehane does an exceptional job of moving his plot along, whether with the romance between Danny Coughlin and a young Irish woman holding too many secrets; or the low-boil confrontation between Laurence and a powerful, conniving cop; or the rivalry between Boston’s mayor and Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, who would eventually ride his much-inflated role in ending the police strike directly to the White House. And the author’s portrayal of baseball star Babe Ruth, who winds through this yarn like a lazy river, popping up periodically for comic relief or to assist in illuminating the era’s culture, is marvelous. – Jeff Pierce