The Force

Starred review from April 10, 2017
Edgar-finalist Winslow (The Cartel) peers into the soul of modern America through the eyes of a supremely skilled and corrupt police officer, in this epic novel of devastating moral complexity. Dennis Malone, a veteran NYPD detective sergeant, leads the Manhattan North Special Task Force, an elite unit established to combat drugs, gangs, and guns. Keeping the citizens safe is often messy work and sometimes requires unorthodox methods to get results. Gradually, however, Malone and his crew have slipped over the edge, stealing millions in drugs and cash over the years, including a massive amount of heroin seized in the city’s biggest-ever drug bust. Now the feds have built a case against Malone, and they threaten to take him down if he doesn’t help bring in bigger players in the criminal food chain, even if it means betraying his partners. As the reader discovers, Malone’s corruption is but a tiny part of a much larger system that extends into the highest reaches of New York’s power structure, where the real business is done, and everyone on the chain takes a cut. Fans of modern masters such as Don DeLillo, Richard Price, and George Pelecanos will be richly rewarded. Agent: Shane Salerno, Story Factory.

April 15, 2017
Savage dope dealers, dirty cops, corrupt officials, and a few hapless civilians mix it up in New York City.After The Cartel (2015), Winslow follows the drug trade onto the streets. The Manhattan North Special Task Force is a lightly supervised assemblage of "the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, the best, the baddest" cops in the NYPD, and Denny Malone commands a happily representative task force squad: his boyhood pal Phil Russo; big, black Bill Montague, who dresses like an Ivy League professor; and Billy O'Neill, the youngest. The book opens with Malone in a federal lockup--how he got there unfolds in breakneck flashbacks told in the cadences and vocabulary of a cop's speech. The pivotal, but by no means the first, of his many indiscretions is skimming $4 million and 20 kilos of heroin from the scene of a major bust. He also executes the kingpin, and in the raid, Billy is killed. The narrative picks up five months later, and the legal and extralegal exploits of the task force are detailed. The reader is asked to admire the effectiveness of their policing while condemning their methods--Joseph Wambaugh did it better. Malone's brother, Liam, a firefighter, was killed on 9/11, and that horrific disaster for first responders forms a grim attitudinal backdrop to their days. Malone and the boys are dirty cops: they take and deliver payoffs, ignore the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, and administer crude vigilante justice. Drugs are gotten off the street, though some may go up their noses or into their lungs. Eventually Malone is trapped, caught on tape offering to broker a payoff to an assistant district attorney. He cuts a deal to name lawyers but not cops, but corrupt prosecutors and deceitful administrators confound him. His alternatives shrink; more deals are made and abrogated. Are Malone's crimes an inescapable consequence of his working conditions? Must the police break the law to keep the peace? By turns grim and giddy, this is a good read in the service of dark cops.

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January 1, 2017
In this latest from New York Times best-selling author Winslow, who scooped up Los Angeles Times Book Prize and New York Times Critics' Pick credentials for his recent The Cartel, NYPD detective sergeant Denny Malone is committed to fighting the good fight--except now he's dirty, too. With a 250,000-copy first printing.

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