The city referred to here is Providence, Rhode Island – a beautiful city in the New England region of the USA. But in this novel, it wasn’t beautiful in 1986, when opposing organised crime families went to war.
Peace reigns at the novel’s beginning, with the two families, the Irish Murphys and the Italian Morettis, enjoying a brief respite at the beach. Danny Ryan isn’t strictly a Murphy, but he’s been considered part of the Irish crime family since he was young. He’s now married to Terri, the daughter of the patriarch, John Murphy, whose family controls the docks. The Morettis have their own rackets and the two families coexist until Liam Murphy ‘steals’ Paulie Moretti’s girl. Sons from both families escalate the tension between them.
The novel mostly follows Danny. While the sons are hotheads, Danny has a cool head. This is matched on the opposing side by Chris Palumbo. While the sons plot increasingly violent reprisals, the two cool heads approach the war like a chess match, trying to think several moves ahead.
Danny’s life has been complicated. His mother abandoned him at birth and he was raised by his crime boss father, Marty. His mother, Madeleine, used her looks to marry upwards and is now rich in her own right. Danny resents her, but she tries to steer his life remotely, even going as far as having him contacted by the FBI.
As the fighting peaks, Terri is diagnosed with cancer. Danny now has a war on two fronts. He must use his intelligence to try to find a way out before it kills him. Winslow’s narrative voice in City on Fire has it own gangland register and the action hurtles along.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Books and storytelling in a small coastal Rhode Island town. He left at age seventeen to study journalism at the University of Nebraska, where he earned a degree in African Studies. While in college, he traveled to southern Africa, sparking a lifelong involvement with that continent.
Winslow’s travels took him to California, Idaho and Montana before he moved to New York City to become a writer, making his living as a movie theater manager and later a private investigator in Times Square – ‘before Mickey Mouse took it over’. He left to get a master’s degree in Military History and intended to go into the Foreign Service but instead joined a friend’s photographic safari firm in Kenya. He led trips there as well as hiking expeditions in southwestern China, and later directed Shakespeare productions during summers in Oxford, England.
While bouncing back and forth between Asia, Africa, Europe and America, Winslow wrote his first novel, A Cool Breeze On The Underground, which was nominated for an Edgar Award. With a wife and young son, Winslow went back to investigative work, mostly in California, where he and his family lived in hotels for almost three years as he worked cases and became a trial consultant. A film and publishing deal for his novel The Death and Life of Bobby Z allowed Winslow to be full-time writer and settle in his beloved California, the setting for many of his books. Branching into television and film, Winslow, with his friend Shane Salerno, wrote a television series, UC/Undercover, and the two collaborated on the screenplay of his novel, Savages.
Winslow is the recipient of the Raymond Chandler Award (Italy), the LA Times Book Prize, the Ian Fleming Silver Dagger (UK), The RBA Literary Prize (Spain) and many other prestigious awards.
He lives in California with his wife of thirty-one years.
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