Turf wars in Las Vegas: City in Ruins, by Don Winslow, reviewed

So you’d like to borrow half-a-billion dollars? It’s a tribute to the epic ambitions of this novel that the reader swallows questions like this without blinking. In a sense that’s fair enough because City in Ruins is the third book of a trilogy loosely modelled on the great poems of the classical world, particularly the Iliad and the Aeneid.

Don Winslow is probably best known in this country as the author of the widely praised Cartel trilogy, about the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s ‘War of Drugs’. The Danny Ryan trilogy, by contrast, deals with the life and times of a Rhode Island longshoreman who evolves first into a gangster-with-a-heart and finally into a more or less legitimate businessman with a tendency to backslide. He’s a decent man who sometimes does bad things. Think The Godfather or The Sopranos and then multiply the profits by a factor of ten.

Most popular

Julie Bindel

Stonewall’s game is up

Francis Pike

The weapon that could end America’s global supremacy

William Freer

Is Britain braced for the Russian threat from the north?

In the first book, City on Fire, Danny is sucked into a vicious turf war between Italian and Irish gangs in Providence, at the end of which he decamps to Los Angeles with a broken heart, his elderly father and a fortune in heroin.