Pun Salad

This is Don Winslow's (allegedly) penultimate book, and the middle volume of his "Danny Ryan" trilogy. It is a generic page-turning crime thriller, but with pretensions. I read elsewhere that Winslow got some plot inspiration from the Aeneid, which explains some of the unlikely events here.

At the end of the previous book, City on Fire, Danny was one of the few survivors of a Providence, Rhode Island gang war. Disgusted, dispirited, mourning his late wife, he, his infant son, senile dad, and his ragtag crew need to get out of town and go into hiding, avoiding both the law and surviving still-hostile mobsters.

So: off to sunny Southern California. And (speaking of unlikeliness) Danny and his crew get involved with a big-budget movie based on that Providence gang war. And Danny gets, um, involved with the glamorous leading lady, looking to reboot her career after tabloid-fodder history of booze, drugs, and scandal. Spoiler: It turns out poorly.

There's lots of sex, violence, and bad language. And soap operatics. Consumer note: If you tackle the trilogy, you might not want to spend as many months as I did between reading volumes. I found ("at my age") that it was unclear why characters were (variously) killing, betraying, and bonking each other. Oh well, just turn the pages, Paul.