Could not finish. Big disappointment for me after reading Power of the dog trilogy. Could not understand Danny Ryan's character. He seems confused in whole series. ( )

The second book in the Winslow trilogy focuses again on Danny Ryan who was forced to flee his hometown after he took some drugs from the Moretti family and then dumped them.

In this book, Danny is offered a second chance - time away from crime and the oportunity to go 'straight' although Hollywood movies, which he finds himself in, are probably not the best place to try this. Having asked his crew to keep a low profile, Danny falls in love with a Hollywood star and is splurged all over the papers. This brings him to the attention of those he doesn't want, and, like a hamster in a wheel, he is back in the destructive world of crime, gangs, drugs and death. The message here is that you can't ever really escape.

The ending is unusual. Danny eats magic mushrooms and sees his dead family and friends all with a message for him. Written with no punctuation to give us a sense of floating from one idea to another, it was not the sort of ending I expected. Like a scene in a film, it seemed as if Danny was going to go down in flames but I wanted him to get out of the 'life' and to live happily ever after. I doubt that is going to happen even in the final book. ( )

Have to say this Second Book in the Trilogy just keeps getting better.
Absolutely fantastic it’s no wonder it is being made into a film.
I am definitely looking forward to City In Ruins the Final Book in this Marvellous Trilogy.
On my To Be Read Again List. ( )

City of Dreams could not be finished by this reviewer. Just too depressing to hear about the characters' lives. There is too much killing, drugs, running from each other that the story had to be stopped. If one likes reading about the Italian and Irish gangs, then this is the book for them. Only three stars were unfairly given to this book. ( )

The single best use of mescaline in literature ever (yes, I read The Doors of Perception and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.)

I just gobbled this up, as I also did with the first in this series. I am always reading multiple books because I am a quivering ball of ADHD so while I can sink into a book for hours at a time, once I put it down I generally cannot pick it back up for a while. But this is the book I kept wanting to return to, night after night. I have been busy with work and social things, but I have spent most every alone moment for four days with this book. Thankfully I consumed this in audiobook form (beautifully read by Ari Fliakos, who also read the first in the series) or I am sure I would not have cleaned or done laundry or walked anywhere during that time.

In this book we return to the gangster with a heart of gold, Danny Ryan, in the hours after the event that closed out the first book, City on Fire. Danny is our Odysseus, and this leg of the journey takes him from New Hampshire to Southern California. If you read the first book you know that Danny is broke, in the middle of a hailstorm of grief, and in a lot of trouble at the end of the last book. He is Danny though, and things work out for Danny. I don't want to spoil anything but I will say he ends up dead center in the middle of a studio movie (not as an actor) and we find out there are more similarities than one might guess between the Irish mob in Providence and the LA mob behind the visual content we consume. The end of this, like the end of the last book, is like the finale of a good fireworks show, more and more and more until you think "okay already" and then just one more explosion that makes you realize you were wrong and you needed one more.

Great characters, new and old, utter carnage at random points interspersed with cute children and true love and honor and sweetness and also it is all funny as can be. Winslow says this is it. One more book left in this trilogy (which he says is already written) and that is the end. Luckily he has written a lot of books and they are pretty much all very good (or at least the nine I have read) but I still hope he unretires. He is the best. ( )