Nobody's rich, violence seems like a thing of the past, and the hard-wrought gangland peace they presently enjoy, forged years ago by their Irish and Italian forebears, is less celebrated, among this younger generation, than simply…acknowledged. In fact, whatever name they use, it seems everyone's in the mob to some degree or other. The setting is Rhode Island, from 1986 to roughly the end of ‘87 (with high-speed flashbacks to the ‘60s and ‘70s), and our hero is a young Irish dock worker, Danny Ryan, with a young Irish wife, Terri, whose brother is Danny’s best friend and whose father is the head of the Dogtown Irish (they don’t seem to use the word “mob” or “gang” but they’re presented essentially as the red-haired mafia counterpart). But that was before, and now feelings are raw, and Liam has stolen Paulie’s woman, and it’s not funny. Back in the good times…they’d laugh about it. Now he makes some lame response about it begin a free country, but finishes his drink and leaves the bar….It was a stupid joke, the kind guys make to each other a dozen times a day. Yeah, well, Brendan Handrigan never knew what was good for him–if he had, he might have graduated high school, or gone into the Navy or something. “You’ll keep our fucking mouth shut if you know what’s good for you.” Frankie’s a soldier in the Moretti crew he’s sitting at the next table with a couple of his guys, hears it and looks over. The characteristically clipped, swift, wise-guy voice in the prose:

And while City on Fire isn’t the product of Edward Gibbon-style research, whether into cartel power structures or police work or drug trafficking or forensics, Winslow still communicates something authentic just by the way he talks. After three big novels about America’s eternal war on drugs ( Power of the Dog, The Cartel, The Border), and a bestseller about NYPD cops during an opioid epidemic ( The Force), Don Winslow wipes the headline ink off his fingers and sets the new novel, City on Fire, in a 1980s gang war between the Irish and Italian mobs.īut it doesn’t feel any less vivid or engrossing for the inventiveness.

Don winslow the force series