Pun Salad

This is the conclusion to Don Winslow's "Danny Ryan Trilogy", so I figured I might as well read it. My reports on the first two entries: City on Fire and City of Dreams.

As the book opens, Danny's unlikely odyssey has brought him to Vegas, and he has translated his ill-gotten gains from the previous book into successful resorts, so he's a multimillionaire. He dotes on his young son, and is making big, ambitious, plans to set up another resort by purchasing an old-school casino further up the Strip. But a different mogul also has his eye on the property. And both Danny and his wannabe competitor have mob ties from previous years. And those ties eventually turn out to be useful, and then destructive. There is also a vengeful FBI agent who wants to bring Danny down, and a courtroom drama as the fate of a murderer in the previous book is decided.

It's a change from the previous books, which (as I seem to recall) had soap operatics and mayhem throughout. This one eventually gets to some imaginative violence, but the body count remains stuck at zero for hundreds of pages. (There's a one-punch fight on page 38, but that's about it.) How interesting do you find spats over Las Vegas real estate? Read this book to find out!

The book flap says "Winslow has announced that City in Ruins will be his final novel." Why? Well, stories at the time indicated that he wanted to get involved in (anti-Trump) political activism.

(I follow him on Twitter. Where he's as interesting and insightful as your average earnest, rage-fueled, Brown University sophomore girl.)

Anyway, he seems to have had second thoughts about his career. The Final Score, containing "six short novels" is coming out next year.