If they successfully storm a heavily fortified desert safe house where Popeye Abbarca’s cartel stashes millions in drug money, the Feds will allow Danny and his crew to disappear into their new lives. In one of the novel’s most harrowing scenes, Danny and his crew (including two mob soldiers nicknamed the “Altar Boys,” because they coyly boast that they serve their victims “Last Communion”) agree to an “everything-will-be-forgiven” deal with the Drug Enforcement Administration. While he’s no pushover, Danny still avoids unnecessary bloodshed. Danny married into the Irish mob he started out as a dockworker, a mostly decent working stiff. In Virgilian terms, Danny is Aeneas, a guy who’s a little too morally scrupulous for his own good. “City of Dreams,” which begins in 1988, two years after the events of the earlier novel, charts Danny Ryan’s desperate attempt to say goodbye to all the killing and start a new life out West.

That even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences.Īfter all, there is a reason they say to be careful what you wish for. That magic cannot shield her from the dangerous web of court politics. All too soon, Nahri learns that true power is fierce and brutal. Spurning Dara’s warning of the treachery surrounding her, she embarks on a hesitant friendship with Alizayd, an idealistic prince who dreams of revolutionizing his father’s corrupt regime.

And when Nahri decides to enter this world, her arrival threatens to ignite a war that has been simmering for centuries. In Daevabad, within gilded brass walls laced with enchantments and behind the six gates of the six djinn tribes, old resentments run deep.

For Dara tells Nahri an extraordinary tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire and rivers where the mythical marid sleep, past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises and mountains where the circling birds of prey are more than what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass-a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound. But she knows better than anyone that the trades she uses to get by-palm readings, zars, and a mysterious gift for healing-are all tricks, both the means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles and a reliable way to survive.īut when Nahri accidentally summons Dara, an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior, to her side during one of her cons, she’s forced to reconsider her beliefs.

Certainly, she has power on the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent.

The city of brass a novel