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).
The suicide of his movie-star girlfriend sent him to Las Vegas, where his last chapter is set. With help from his wealthy, well-connected mother, he establishes himself as an honest, ambitious high-end hotelier. But the idea that he can escape his past—and one particular Fury he pissed off when he killed her dirty F.B.I.-agent boyfriend—turns out to be a dream larger than his dazzling hotel with that name. To quote not Virgil but Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part III, the final entry in another Mob trilogy: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
City in Ruins is a worthy finale to this epic series—the other books are City on Fire and City of Dreams—and the career of this equally epic crime-fiction writer. Danny remains a sympathetic and conflicted warrior hero, the Las Vegas milieu circa 1997 is drawn boldly and efficiently, and the Mob characters are indelible. Winslow’s minimalist but effective, highly charged prose moves the saga along at an urgent clip. All this, and the way moral dilemmas and the many uses of violence are passed from one generation to the next, elevate the Danny Ryan trilogy to the highest circle of mobster myth. Don’t even think about reading these three books out of order.
City in Ruins is a worthy finale to Don Winslow’s epic Danny Ryan series—and the career of this equally epic crime-fiction writer.
Compared to Danny Ryan, Crissy Dowling is small fry, but the improbable heroine of Chris Bohjalian’s The Princess of Las Vegas fully owns her little niche of that city: in a small cabaret in the second-rate Buckingham Palace Casino, Crissy becomes Princess Diana twice-nightly in a musical-tribute show. Thanks to a close physical resemblance and Broadway training, Crissy’s act is a solid success that classes up the B.P., as it’s known. At five foot three she’s a little short to be inhabiting the five-foot-10-inch Princess, and she has incorporated a Charles impersonator into the show, but somehow it works. For an ironic person, Crissy is resolutely un-ironic about Diana and her audience.
Her permanent residency has earned her a suite in the casino and a private cabana at the pool, where she self-medicates with vodka and pills, trying to make each day exactly the same as the last. This malaise makes her life ripe for disruption in the form of her feckless sister Betsy, who moves to Las Vegas to work at her new boyfriend’s shady crypto-currency firm.
When the fintech gangsters exploit the sisters’ relationship as part of their plan to take over the Buckingham Palace, it rips Crissy’s lovingly spun cocoon to shreds. But she’s no Blanche DuBois—she’s survived this long on her wits, and she’s not going to fold now.
Chris Bohjalian is a literary chameleon who has immersed himself in many disparate worlds in the course of his 24-book career, and he knows how to seduce the reader. Crissy’s Diana shtick may sound cheesy, but Bohjalian’s commitment to his leading lady makes us root for Crissy to hold on to her fragile kingdom. Mayhem lovers will be reassured to know that the book begins with a Mob hit, and the violence that erupts intermittently afterward explodes in an almost farcical coda at the end.
Chris Bohjalian is a literary chameleon who has immersed himself in many disparate worlds in the course of his 24-book career, and his commitment to his leading lady in The Princess of Las Vegas makes us root for her.
It’s a long way from Las Vegas to cosseted suburban London, but some problems are universal. Just as Crissy tried to insulate her world from unwelcome invaders, so did the residents of the six homes in the gated Riverview Close community manage to coexist harmoniously for years. But since Close to Death is Anthony Horowitz’s fifth murder mystery featuring detective Daniel Hawthorne and his Boswell/sidekick, Anthony Horowitz, we know that won’t last.
Horowitz takes a different approach with this book. In the absence of a crime to chronicle in real time, as he usually has, and the pressure of a book contract to fulfill, Anthony asks Hawthorne if there’s an intriguing murder from his past he can write about. Hawthorne recalls a grisly one from five years earlier and sends his case notes and interviews—in installments, a classic Hawthorne move—for Anthony to assemble into book form. Hawthorne’s assistant on this old case was someone almost as mysterious as Hawthorne himself, an ex-policeman named John Dudley, about whom Anthony is especially curious.
The story is conceptually influenced by Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, with Riverview Close filling in for the luxury train. Its serenity is upended when the obnoxious, ostentatiously wealthy Kenworthy family moves in and wreaks havoc on the formerly genteel crescent.
Giles Kenworthy is subsequently killed with a bolt from a crossbow, quite the definitive solution to the neighbor-from-hell problem. Every resident of the Close had a reason to hate Kenworthy, and when one of them dies from asphyxiation in his garage, it seems obvious: the dead man killed Kenworthy and then himself. Case closed, according to the police, but Hawthorne and Dudley don’t buy it and continue to investigate on their own.
Close to Death unfolds like a typically delightful Hawthorne-and-Horowitz adventure—amusing, absorbing, slightly more straightforward than its predecessors. But nothing in this series is ever truly simple, which is where Anthony’s interest in Dudley comes in. At first, his fixation may seem a bit of a head-scratcher, possibly motivated by insecurity, but Horowitz has a few extra tricks up his sleeve that will provide plenty of Christie-esque stimulation for readers who relish a challenge.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mystery books at AIR MAIL. She lives in New York City