City on Fire was published by William Morrow in 2022, the first volume of a planned trilogy. Danny Ryan is a low-level soldier in the Murphy family, one of two Irish-American crime families that have divided Providence, Rhode Island, between them. The Murphys control the docks; the Morettis control the unions. An uneasy peace has held for years — until Pam, the wife of a Moretti associate, begins an affair with Danny’s brother-in-law, and the insult triggers a war.
The parallels to Homer’s Iliad are deliberate and structural: Pam is Helen, the two families are the Greeks and Trojans, and the war that follows is as destructive and as futile as the original. Winslow uses the Homeric framework not as a literary exercise but as a narrative engine: the Iliad’s plot provides the escalating structure (insult, retaliation, counter-retaliation, total war), while the Providence setting provides the specific texture of Irish-American organized crime in the 1980s.
Danny is the novel’s Hector — a man who does not want the war, who sees its futility, but who cannot walk away because loyalty demands that he fight. Winslow writes him with the same sympathy he brought to Frank Machianno in The Winter of Frankie Machine: a fundamentally decent man trapped in a system that rewards only violence.
Collecting City on Fire
First edition (William Morrow, New York, 2022): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15
- Signed: $30–$80