City of Dreams picks up exactly where City on Fire left off, and the result is even sharper, funnier, and more brilliant than its predecessor … but Winslow makes this Aeneid-inspired tale soar―sometimes from epic to venal, or from poignant to comical―and it makes the wait for the third book unbearable. It is clear the FBI and the mob want Ryan dead, but the former head of the CIA and currently a Georgetown University professor, Evan Penner wants him alive, which allows Winslow to introduce a number of characters that help create varied plot twists. For every standout second tale like Empire Strikes Back or The Two Towers, there’s more than a few that fizzle. Last year, Winslow announced that after his next book, “City in Ruins,” he would put aside his writing to focus on political activism.

Distinct from its predecessor, “City on Fire,” in the geographical sweep of its story, “City of Dreams” reads like one long breathless drag race between Danny and his many enemies on the all-American road to Nowhere. City of Dreams (2023) is the middle game of the Danny Ryan trilogy, which began with City on Fire (2021) and will end next year with next year’s City in Ruins (April 2024).Danny is our Odysseus, and this leg of the journey takes him from New Hampshire to Southern California. Danny soon learns that his mother has almost unlimited influence in all areas, and eventually warms to her as both mother and benefactor, and she protects him against all enemies which allows him to decide what he wants to make of himself, and where his future should lie. His wife has just died, and he cannot even attend her funeral as he has enraged the Italian faction of the mob and is being hunted by the FBI, suspected of having murdered one of their (dirty) agents.

City of Dreams can be read as a standalone--enough backstory is given to understand the situations the characters face--but I recommend reading City on Fire first, just because it's an excellent read. He made a dope deal with a corrupt FBI agent who was in league with the Morretis and, instead of making off with a fortune, he dumped ten million dollars of dope in the Long Island Sound. If I had been reading this, I would have been highlighting phrases for the sheer poetry combined with spot on accuracy.He takes along several of his lieutenants who he constantly admonishes to keep a low profile and find honest work. It is the second instalment in an urban gangster trilogy and begins with Irish gangster Danny Ryan having just emerged on the losing side of a battle with the Italian Mafia for criminal control of Providence, a city on the north-east coast of America.

There’s a great deal of character development going on, something that Don Winslow is highly adept at crafting. Themes in this book have been extensively interrogated elsewhere in crime fiction: the remnants of two once-powerful criminal traditions fighting it out for control in a rapidly changing economic and social landscape; a reluctant but talented criminal who wants to go legitimate; a major score that could set him and his crew up for life, but which comes with enormous risk. The film entitled, “Providence” has a “Danny Ryan type figure” and when the “Alter boys” want a larger stake in the film the producer pushes them away resulting in negative happenings on the set. He and the Irish had lost the gang war and he has decided it’s time to take himself and the remainder of his family out of Providence before it’s too late. With its large cast of memorable characters and low-key allusions to classical literature, in CITY OF DREAMS Winslow provides incontrovertible evidence that he is part of this elite group, and perhaps is the best among them with his wit, erudition, and riveting approach to storytelling.Not quite the epic gangster story as the earlier City On Fire, this one chronicles the aftermath and the way in which members from both sides of the gang war have coped. In “City on Fire,” the mob war began the moment a bikini-clad goddess named Pam, girlfriend of mobster Paulie Moretti, walked out of the Atlantic onto a Providence-area beach and into the arms of the wrong man, an Irish guy. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.