Las Vegas hotel-casinos might seem sophisticated and squeaky-clean these days, with residencies by top artists such as U2 and Adele, Michelin-starred restaurants, and boldly eccentric architecture. But the bottom line is the same: beneath these shiny surfaces, it’s all about the gambling. And where there’s gambling, there’s probably organized crime, as two new Las Vegas–set novels contend. There’s always some vestige or new twist—hello, crypto-currency!—that will keep them entwined.
This concept is writ large in City in Ruins, the final book of Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy, which he says is his last novel, period. Inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid, the series has taken the Irish-American Mob foot soldier from Providence on a monumental American journey. After losing a brutal gang war with the Italians, Danny fled with his infant son to the West Coast, where he hid out and then re-invented himself as a movie producer (with millions hijacked from a Mexican drug cartel).
