City in Ruins by Don Winslow

City in Ruins

By Don Winslow

HarperCollins, 2024

It’s Vegas, baby, and Danny Ryan’s wealth is massive. He heads a hotel and casino development group that turns tens of millions into hundreds. But Danny never cared much for money, the low-key Irish dock worker longs for the security of his family and the safety of loved ones. With a furrowed brow we enter City in Ruins to learn of Danny’s burn-it-all-to-ground yearning to create a mega-hotel grander than Gaudi’s wildest dream. His elevator pitch to potential investors is horrific:

Las Vegas has built replicas of things that exist. Pyramids, pirate ships, state fairs, I want to build something that doesn’t exist--a dream. There is no time, no space, no linear continuum. We see people we know, people we don’t, people who are alive, people who are dead. We things that were, things that are, and things that never could be. And yet, there they are. We can see them, smell them, touch them, taste them, and yet they’re ephemeral, as fleeting as a shadow that races across the sky.

Is this a zany Carl Hiaasen villain? Nope, Danny continues in a later chapter:

The main lobby is to be constructed of LED walls on which the images are never the same, ever, twice. He wants the elevators to the rooms bathed in constantly shifting light. He wants the three residential towers of the hotel to sweep up in a graceful curve from the central building.

“What are you looking for?” one frustrated architect asked him. “Oz?”

“No,” Danny said. “Oz has been done.”

The costs for Il Sogno (the Italian word for dream) exceed a billion dollars, and Danny’s financial group is forced to take the company public. To the surprise of only Danny, a competitor gains majority control and a quirky series of misunderstandings gets the blood and plot flowing.

Thankfully, another storyline plays out in City in Ruins, the homicide trial of Peter Moretti Jr. At the conclusion of City of Dreams (2023), Peter Jr. wields a shotgun on his mother and her lover upon learning they planned his father’s death. A turbulent, well charted courtroom drama unfolds, connecting the current story to earlier pieces and characters.

This powerful trilogy began with City On Fire (2021), a vivid snapshot into ‘80s era Irish and Italian mobsters in Rhode Island. Winslow blows heavy breaths of fresh air into the pasta-soaked gangster genre. Dueling criminal empires are explored through the perspective of low-level players and the reader follows Danny as he clashes against those who use other’s suffering to relive their own. Winslow is at his finest, dangling a string of firecrackers in our faces before he lights the first. Even braced and expectant of the next pop we always startle.

Using embers from City on Fire, Winslow flames the second installment of the trilogy, City of Dreams, into a thoughtful thriller with an identity of its own. The arcs of emotionally authentic characters progress. With Usain Bolt-like pacing with a couple of well-timed brake taps we speed through a dazzling narrative. The events from the first book are retold in a creative, meta-Hollywood fashion.

Family, culture and passion drive City on Fire and City of Dreams, but this final entry in the Danny Ryan saga is essentially a property dispute. The rich squabbling over money and power which they don’t appear to genuinely care for, lower stakes, less compelling machinations. City in Ruins harnesses only a fraction of the wattage streaking across the pages of the books leading up to it.

Don Winslow’s astounding novels deservedly placed him atop the crime thriller genre for decades. His accomplishments are vast, his accolades deserved. The Power of the Dog is one of the most comprehensive works of fiction of the 21st century.

City in Ruins is supposedly his final novel (wink, wink). Winslow’s flocks of dedicated fans deserve the same as Danny Ryan, one more story.

Ryan Davison, Ph.D. is a writer living in Lisbon