This is a very fast-moving novel with lots of suspense and moderately graphic violence. It is super-good.  I’d say it’s somewhere between Mario Puzo and James Lee Burke.  The epigraphs of from Homer’s Iliad could have warned me but I didn’t catch on to those ideas until Part 2.     

City On Fire 
By Don Winslow
2022 
Read by Ari Fliakos 8h 54m
Rating: A++ / crime thriller 

From the Washington Post: 
“Don Winslow’s terrific new novel “City on Fire” does for Rhode Island what David Chase’s “The Sopranos” did for New Jersey. The Ocean State Chamber of Commerce won’t necessarily see it as a favor.” –

But old as I am I compared it more to Mario Puzo (The Godfather). 

Instead of chasing the big drug lords of Mexican cartels Winslow’s main character (Danny Ryan) is involved with there long time Irish gang as well as the Italians and Blacks and the Mafia is always in the background.Times are tough in the 1980s and the fishermen and truckers need to supplement their income some way and there’s a gang which sticks to the usual rackets.  But the sales of drugs has got in and the old ways are going out, as in the old “bosses” are dying and retiring and with them the old ways go – including the truce they devised many years ago. These old “bosses” include Danny’s father, Martin Ryan, and his rival Pasco Ferris. And it’s lucrative. 

The action moves from romantic rivalries at a party to murder and mayhem and sinister retaliation with fathers raising sons having babies and unto the next generation.  And it all curls around to the FBI not being any more upstanding than your run-of-the-street gangster.  

There is a huge homage to Homer and other classics here.  I’m now waiting on the second book in this trilogy.