Onyx reviews: City on Fire by Don Winslow

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 01/02/2023

The peaceful—occasionally even amicable—relationship between the members of the Irish and Italian families who control much of the crime and labor in Providence, Rhode Island in 1986 is at a crossroads. Members of the older generation of both families are ready to retire. Pasco Ferri, the Italian patriarch, wants to move to Florida and John Murphy, who is showing his age, wants only to dig clams and fish for crabs. The next-in-line of both families are ready to encourage their retirement plans so they can make a name for themselves.

The Irish are woefully outnumbered by the Italians, who have greater local numbers but also the support of the Mafia network in the nearby large cities. The two factions operate by a longstanding set of rules of engagement. Any slight, real or perceived, requires complex negotiations to come up with a satisfactory method of redress to prevent things from escalating. The Irish almost always lose out in these negotiations, and the gentlemen's rules implemented by the older leaders are less important to the younger generation.

Danny Ryan never wanted to get embroiled in the life of crime but he fell in love with Terri Murphy and she refused to marry someone whose only ambition was to be a fisherman. He may have married into the Murphy clan, but he's never been embraced by the business arm of that family, relegated to the second tier as a muscle man who's never killed anyone. Slightly smarter than the average mobster, he attributes the onset of a gang war to a woman, an outsider named Pam.

City on Fire draws inspiration from the Greek epics, including The Iliad. Pam Davies is Winslow's Helen of Troy, the beautiful woman whose kidnapping set off the Trojan War. Pam wasn't kidnapped, though. She arrives at an annual interfamily clam bake on the arm of Paulie Moretti and soon causes a crisis when she accuses Liam Murphy of groping her. However, when Liam is hospitalized for a severe beating doled out as payback for his unacceptably disrespectful behavior, she leaves Paulie for Liam. This personal affront is enough to start a war. In truth, the kindling had already been prepared and the logs stacked in preparation for a bonfire. Pam was simply the spark that lit the match that set the whole thing ablaze.

Liam, Danny's brother-in-law, is the youngest of the Murphy gang. He talks big but lacks motivation, tact and nerve. The only thing he has going for him is good looks. Pam is the book's real enigma. She remains at Liam's side even after he devolves into drug addiction and violence, primarily because she understands her part in everything that happened after that night on the beach. Women are mostly relegated to the sidelines in this environment, except for Danny's long-absent mother, who has her own sphere of power and influence. Although Danny wants nothing to do with her, she steps in to provide assistance after Danny is injured in an ambush-gone-bad.

The press are delighted by the outbreak of violence—it sells newspapers—and the police are willing to let the two factions kill each other so long as they do it in places that won't disturb ordinary citizens or tourists. After a car bomb and another brutal and very public murder, the authorities send word to tone things down and, for a while, an uneasy truce abides. However, as the two sides jockey for supreme power and internal rifts appear as ambitious men attempt to grab power by removing those who stand in the way, the peace can't last for long.

Danny, a new father whose wife is seriously ill, wants to find a way out. A complicated heist plan (including a modern-day Trojan Horse) looks like it might provide him with the means to escape Dogtown (the Irish part of Providence) once and for all. However, there's no honor among thieves...or anyone else, as it turns out.

In addition to the Greek epics (Danny is modeled after Aeneas, the narrator of The Aeneid), City on Fire (the first book in a trilogy) will remind readers of The Godfather, with its rash of back-and-forth murders. The novel explores themes as old as the Greeks—family, loyalty and honor, and the greatest of these, as it turns out, is loyalty.