Book review: ‘City of Dreams,’ by Don Winslow

Hours before slamming his foot down on the accelerator and heading west, Danny hijacked ten kilos of heroin from the Italians and killed a crooked FBI agent who was about to blow him away. Now, the New England Mafia, the FBI, and the police are out to get him — one FBI subdirector, in particular, “wants Ryan delivered like KFC. In a bag or in a box.”

Before journey’s end, Danny will also be hunted down by a Mexican cartel run by a psychopath named Popeye Abbarca, whose men will comb roadside motels and bars, thirsting for Danny’s blood and that of his kin. Though inflected with occasional reflections on the absurdity of the human condition, “City of Dreams” is no picaresque; instead, as his many fans have come to expect from Winslow, this latest novel in a projected trilogy is unrelentingly tough, tense and violent. (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.

Don Winslow is giving up novels for politics. His latest book is a gem.

Winslow prefers classical allusions to such Springsteen tropes. He’s grounded the first two novels in his trilogy in allusions to Virgil’s “Aeneid,” the Latin epic about the Trojan Wars started by, well, isn’t it always a beautiful dame? 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 beach and into the arms of the wrong man, an Irish guy. In Winslow’s world, Italians and Irish, like Trojans and Greeks, do not know how to let the little things go.

“City of Dreams,” which begins in 1988, two years after the events of the earlier novel, charts Danny Ryan’s desperate attempt to say goodbye to all the killing and start a new life out West. In Virgilian terms, Danny is Aeneas, a guy who’s a little too morally scrupulous for his own good. Danny married into the Irish mob; he started out as a dockworker, a mostly decent working stiff. While he’s no pushover, Danny still avoids unnecessary bloodshed. In one of the novel’s most harrowing scenes, Danny and his crew (including two mob soldiers nicknamed “The Altar Boys,” because they coyly boast that they serve their victims “Last Communion”) agree to an “everything-will-be-forgiven” deal with the DEA. If they successfully storm a heavily fortified desert safe house where Popeye Abbarca’s cartel stashes millions in drug money, the Feds will allow Danny and his crew to disappear into their new lives. But, after the shooting stops and the loot is packed away in the getaway car, Danny hesitates to execute Abbarca’s men who are zip-tied on the floor. Our mournful omniscient narrator comments:

“Danny should kill them all. The Mexicans and the Italian, too. But that ain’t Danny. It’s always been his problem — he’s softhearted and believes in God. Heaven and hell and all that happy crap. He’s hit the button on a few guys, but it was always him or them, not like this.”

Whether his Irish-Catholic conscience turns out to be Danny’s fatal flaw will, doubtless, be the great question resolved in the final novel of Winslow’s trilogy. Here, it’s not giving much away to disclose that in Part Two of “City of Dreams,” Danny finds himself in Hollywood, where a movie called “Providence” is being made about the very mob wars Danny has tried to escape. A second chance at happiness seems in reach: Danny is dating a beautiful movie star and he’s even reconciled with his own mother, Madeleine, a former Las Vegas showgirl-and-mistress-to-powerful-men who abandoned him as a child. (Symbol alert: Aeneas’ own mother, Aphrodite, abandoned him as a child.) Needing a safe harbor for baby Ian, Danny turns to Madeleine, now a wealthy power player herself. Turns out this well-preserved goddess is also a doting grandmother. What could go wrong?

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Well, if you know your Aeneid — or your Don Winslow crime novels — you know The Fates are never kind for long. That’s a break for us fans of mob sagas masterfully executed with class.

Maureen Corrigan is a professor of Literature at Georgetown University and the book critic for the NPR program, Fresh Air.

William Morrow. 352 pp. $30