Don Winslow says farewell to fiction in high style
City in Ruins
Don Winslow
William Morrow
With City on Fire (2022), City of Dreams (2023) and now City in Ruins, Don Winslow has written a near-perfect saga: He's created great characters who grow and develop while remaining true to their essence, and a sweeping story that morphs and expands over time, with the stakes escalating until they reach nosebleed heights at the end. Winslow says he has given up writing novels to devote his time to political activism: “I wanted in the fight. I didn't want to be writing a fiction obituary of America losing democracy,” he told the Los Angeles Times. With City in Ruins, he is saying farewell in high style.
Winslow modelled this trilogy on Virgil's Roman tragedy The Aeneid, an intention made obvious by the epigrams in all three novels. However, you needn't be a Roman or Greek scholar to enjoy these books (and though it is best to read them in order, it's not vital). These novels wear their inspiration lightly. The epic poems do not bleed into Winslow's story but linger like ghosts in the background.
At the centre of the three City books is Danny Ryan, a Rhode Island version of “a Springsteen kind of guy,” a one-time Providence waterfront worker from a scrappy Irish American family. Over the course of the series, he has got mixed up with the mob, fought epic (yet doomed) battles and resurrected himself in Hollywood. After marrying into the family of the king of the Irish mob in Providence, he ends up their reluctant leader in a fatalistic war with the Italians, runs to the West Coast with his family and crew to lie low when it all blows up, manages to claw back his life, gets involved with a movie that's being made about the Rhode Island mob, and falls in love with a celebrity superstar.
In the final moments of City of Dreams, Ryan is in a bad place: in the desert, facing off against a Mexican gang lord who wants to end him. Ryan's life has turned around in the opening of City in Ruins. He now owns a casino on the Las Vegas Strip; he's being a good dad to his son, Ian, with whom he escaped from Rhode Island; and he has a psychotherapist girlfriend who's very different from his previous love interests — in other words, good for him. But then Ryan decides to indulge his ambition by building a billion-dollar resort casino complex.
Winslow shows us step by step what it takes to do something this grandiose in Vegas, where everything is supersized. Winslow immerses readers in the hidden world of organized crime, highlighting its inner workings. Whether it's jousting between lawyers, etiquette among wise guys or the history of the mob in Vegas, Winslow knows how to make a reader feel like one of the cognoscenti.