But, after the shooting stops and the loot is packed away in the getaway car, Danny hesitates to execute Abbarca’s men who are zip-tied on the floor. 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. It renews that tradition by regrounding storytelling in its native habitat of social life and resituating the figure of the writer as observer, listener, and conveyor of tales.

Danny married into the Irish mob he started out as a dockworker, a mostly decent working stiff. The trilogy elucidates the conditions and limitations, as well as the enduring appeal and unexhausted possibilities, of the social novel. It was chosen by The New York Times critics as one of the 15 remarkable books by women that are 'shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century. In Virgilian terms, Danny is Aeneas, a guy who’s a little too morally scrupulous for his own good. Outline is a novel by Rachel Cusk, the first in a trilogy known as The Outline trilogy, which also contains the novels Transit and Kudos.

“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.