I've been a fan of Don Winslow ever since, intrigued by the title, I picked a paperback of [California Fire and Life] off a library-sale table a couple of decades ago. [City on Fire] isn't his best work, but even an average outing with Winslow is an enormously entertaining roller-coaster ride. The plot whizzes along, the characters are more complex and vividly drawn than a lesser writer would bother to make them, and the setting -- Rhode Island in in the mid-80s, a time and a place I experienced first-hand -- is evoked with pitch-perfect accuracy. Winslow is better known for his novels about California and the desert Southwest, but he made me feel the fog rolling in off Narragansett Bay all over again, as if it were yesterday rather than 40 years ago.

The plot -- a riff on the origins of the Trojan War, played out among the rival Irish and Italian mobs in mid-eighties Providence -- is standard crime-fiction stuff. There are ethnic tensions, generational conflicts, and complicated family loyalties. The working-class social milieu is also familiar. You can feel Winslow, on both fronts, working what's usually Dennis Lehane's corner. In [City on Fire], though, Winslow takes a different path through the material than either Lehane or (for that matter) Mario Puzo. His hero, Danny Ryan, is anything but a young man with a pedigree, destined for great things. He's a modestly talented, modestly accomplished, modestly ambitious gangster who longs for more respect and responsibility than he gets from those he serves.

When a slight at an end-of-summer clambake spirals into open warfare between rival ethnic mobs, Danny gets a far bigger shot than he ever dreamed of: a chance to establish himself as a great leader or die in the process. Winslow makes it clear, however, that Danny isn't a Rhode Island version of Joe Coughlin, let alone Michael Corleone. He alternates between brilliant improvisations and disastrous miscalculations, sometimes supported by those closest to him and other times undermined by them for their own purposes. The book -- first in a trilogy -- ends with him achieving one of his dearest wishes, but at a terrible cost. Danny is, throughout the story, plausibly and refreshingly imperfect.

[City on Fire] is a crime story, not an extended contemplation of the human condition, but it has more going on, I think, than many reviewers on LibraryThing have given it credit for. "Loyalty" and "respect" are old, old tropes in crime stories, but Winslow finds interesting things to do with them, using them in more complicated ways than he seems to be doing at first. Danny's complicated family life, particularly his relationships with his estranged mother and quasi-adopted parents, also turn out to be more intriguing than it appears at first glance.

One of the running themes of the story is how the weight of history (personal, family, community) and the push and pull of old obligations (real or imagined) steers our lives in directions other than the ones we might choose for ourselves, given the chance. In this, as in his evocation of the Narragansett Bay fog, Winslow gets the ineffable nature of the thing perfectly right. ( )

This book was such an easy read for me. I love Danny's mom! What a bad ass ( )

I can imagine a reader with no familiarity with Homer and Virgil finding this a twisty and fresh take on the mob thriller--in one of the last places we haven't seen them done over and over again. Sadly, I'm not that reader. Once one is familiar with the events of Homer's Iliad and the subsequent tales of Aeneas, there is nothing surprising about anything that takes place here. All the thrills and unexpected are entirely absent. Being rewarded for being well read is not enough to ultimately save this derivative mobster tale. ( )

Ce roman de Don Winslow, le premier d'une trilogie, brille par son efficacité mais manque un peu de profondeur d'intrigue, surtout si on le compare à La griffe du chien, autre premier roman d'une trilogie de l'auteur. On passe néanmoins un bon moment à cette lecture qui nous plonge dans une famille mafieuse qui, par certains côté voire par certains travers, rappelle la famille Soprano, dans la série télévisée du même nom. Et, une fois le livre terminé, on a envie d'en savoir plus sur la nouvelle vie de Danny Ryan. ( )

My first book by this author. I thought the book was very good, moved along, plausible plot. I’m looking forward to the second book in the series. ( )