Review: Don Winslow writes mob war epic inspired by Homer

“City of Dreams,” by Don Winslow (William Morrow)

“City of Dreams” is the middle book in a planned trilogy that began when a stunning woman emerged from the surf at a Rhode Island beach in last year’s “City on Fire” and sparked a war between the state’s Irish and Italian crime families.

Now, as the latest installment opens, Danny Ryan leads what’s left of the defeated Irish mob on an epic, cross-country journey in search of a new home and a measure of safety from the Italian gangsters, the Rhode Island State Police, FBI agents and a growing number of other pursuers dead set on putting them in the ground.

“Ryan’s not sure where they are going,” author Don Winslow writes, “just that they have to get the hell out of Rhode Island.”

If the story reminds readers of Homer’s “The Iliad” and Virgil’s “Aeneid,” in which jealousy over a beauty named Helen sparked a war between the Greeks and the Trojans, it should. Winslow peppers his yarn with allusions and quotes from the epic Greek poems, casting Ryan in the role of a modern-day warrior at odds with his fate.

After a series of close calls, the fugitives settle in California, some of them risking their lives by ignoring Danny’s order to “lay low.” Eventually, however, Danny violates the order himself. Through a series of circumstances, he ends up investing in a Hollywood movie based on his own life, falling in love with its female lead, making a new enemy of the Los Angeles crime family and putting himself and his crew of expats in mortal danger.

By the end of the new novel, Danny and the few friends he has left are on the run again, setting the stage for the trilogy’s upcoming conclusion, “City in Ruins.”

With 23 novels to his credit, Winslow has earned a reputation as one of the finest crime novelists writing in English. Earlier novels, including “The Death and Life of Bobby Z” and “California Power and Light,” were beautifully written and inventively plotted, but with each subsequent book, the author’s ambition has grown, leading to much longer, critically acclaimed novels including a powerful trilogy about the war on drugs: “The Power of the Dog” (2005), “The Cartel” (2015), and “The Border" (2019).

With the Danny Ryan trilogy, Winslow seems destined to claim a place beside Mario Puzzo’s “The Godfather” on the Mount Rushmore of American crime fiction. ___

Bruce DeSilva, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, is the author of the Mulligan crime novels including “The Dread Line.”