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.
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. In City of Dreams, he invests in the movie business before it all ends in tears. And at the start of City in Ruins he’s a hugely successful hotelier in Las Vegas, who is planning to become even wealthier by buying a crumbling property on the Strip, pulling it down and building the swankiest hotel ever seen in its place. Hence the need for half-a-billion dollars.
The trouble is, his plan involves treading on the toes of another businessman who already has a deal in place to buy the site.
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