From fire to dreams to ruins
Don Winslow finally brings Danny Ryan home
Don Winslow ends his career as a master of crime fiction with “City in Ruins,” capping a trilogy he began crafting decades ago. In 2023, Winslow said he’d leave fiction after publishing this gripping novel, shifting his communications skills to sharpen the messaging of the Democratic Party. “City in Ruins” is his way of coming home, in parallel with Danny Ryan, the hero of this striking trilogy.
“City on Fire” tracked Ryan’s violent, morally porous activity as a Mob guy in and around Providence, the Rhode Island city where Winslow came of age. “City of Dreams” took Ryan and his gang to Los Angeles, where he became involved in the movie business. “City in Ruins” largely focuses on Las Vegas, though it ends in New England. Overtones of the Iliad and the Aeneid flavor all three Ryan books.
Like Denny Malone, the opportunistic cop who drove “The Force,” a powerful novel Winslow published in 2017, Ryan is restless, ambitious and largely transactional in his relationships. He also wants to be swept away. In “City in Ruins,” his love is Eden, a therapist who’d rather keep their affair on the down-low. His greater love is his family, particularly his son Ian. Scenes of their relationship are among the sunniest in this predominantly cloudy story.
The field Winslow explores, with depth and savvy, is hospitality, an arena in which Las Vegas excels. Much of the book is about Ryan’s vision: to build Il Sogno, a hotel of high technology and beauty where, he guarantees, room revenue will exceed gambling revenue. To realize this unique structure, Ryan has to tap Pasco Ferri, a Mob holdover from Providence whose dirty money Ryan needs — at least at first. While Ferri doesn’t appear often, he casts a long shadow.
As is his wont, Winslow ratchets up tension by interweaving overarching and lesser plot lines. While his hotel ambitions take center stage, pitting the upstart Ryan against established Vegas hotel magnate Vern “Pizza Face” Winegard, Winslow writes contrapuntally about law enforcement’s attempt to unearth Ryan’s criminal past and prosecute him.
One line of inquiry underpinning Winslow’s canny examination of Ryan’s character is our hero’s evolution from criminal to respected, legitimate businessman. It is a frequent trajectory in Winslow novels.
Despite the book’s complexity, Winslow’s narrative drive and gunshot style make for compulsive reading. So does his command of the vernacular. Here, Danny Ryan is about to alert Eden to some of the seamier aspects of his life:
“I did something terrible.” “And you’re coming to confess?” Eden asks.
Once an Irish Catholic boy, always an Irish Catholic boy, she thinks.
Although Dan has joked about it — “I come from a town where guys go to confession and take the Fifth. ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. And I believe you know my attorney, Mr. O’Neill.’”
Winslow deftly moves the plot forward, even as he reprises developments with their roots in storylines from the book’s two predecessors. Orchestrally plotted, teeming with major characters like Ryan and his closest associates and enemies, “City in Ruins” ties ends Winslow kept loose until now. Even minor characters, like the sadistic thug Allie Licata, and Camilla Cooper, a hypocritical “family values” crusader bent on destroying Ryan, are engrossing.
Winslow has perfected the art of writing from inside a character’s head. For example, soon after Vern Winegard loses his son in a gangland slaying, his wife is medicated, and Winegard considers whether he should be too:
Vern refused the medication because it somehow felt disloyal to Bryce not to feel the pain. Now he breathes pain, breathes it in but doesn’t breathe it out. It swirls in and around him, like an invisible chain that makes it hard to move his arms and legs, makes it hard to think.
Winslow has written another novel to blast through. I miss him already.