City on Fire an instant classic

City on Fire Don Winslow William Morrow

Don Winslow's novel City on Fire does for Rhode Island what David Chase's The Sopranos did for New Jersey. Danny Ryan, the novel's intermittently decent-hearted, otherwise amoral protagonist, says things like the state motto of Rhode Island is “I know a guy.” The extra-income opportunities for young Providence waterfront worker Danny and his Dogtown-neighbourhood Irish American family and pals are limited to dockside pilferage, which is not nearly as lucrative as gambling, truck hijacking, loansharking, protection and strip clubs, over which the Italian Mob has a monopoly. And it's the Mafia that's connected to judges, pols and cops.

In the 1980s, a truce between the ethnic gangs had held for decades — Danny even moonlights helping jack a truckload of Armani suits for gangland-rival Peter Moretti — until Danny's brotherin-law, Liam, drunkenly grabs Moretti's girlfriend. This insult sets in a motion a series of betrayals and bloody murders.

Danny has a semblance of a moral conscience, but this is a novelty among his family and pals. Racism is as commonplace as the misogyny that makes most of the young Mob wives little more than sex-doll-like possessions. Only Danny's mother, who abandoned him and her alcoholic husband and shows up later seeking forgiveness, is a woman with a mind of her own. She has the moral complexity of Carmela Soprano but makes fewer compromises.

The gangland history is fascinating and seems to be based loosely on the rise and fall of the reallife Patriarca family. But it's Winslow's ways with character, as well as his fluid narrative and visual scene-setting, that suggest this novel, the first in a planned trilogy, could end up in the American Mob canon along with the works of Puzo, Scorsese and Chase.

Winslow's Cartel Trilogy provides a look at the Mexican drug wars; now he's doing a similar job on one of the more depraved aspects of Rhode Island, where he grew up. He'll publish the second book in the trilogy in April 2023 and the last in April 2024.

Danny Ryan has known murder, vengeance and corruption. Will he find “redemption?” Read City on Fire — then stay tuned.