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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jun 2017, 496 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2018, 400 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Gary Presley
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The acclaimed, award-winning, bestselling author of The Cartel - voted one of the Best Books of the Year by more than sixty publications, including the New York Times - makes his William Morrow debut with a cinematic epic as explosive, powerful, and unforgettable as Mystic River and The Wire.
Our ends know our beginnings, but the reverse isn't true...
All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop.
He is "the King of Manhattan North," a, highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of "Da Force." Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest, an elite special unit given unrestricted authority to wage war on gangs, drugs and guns. Every day and every night for the eighteen years he's spent on the Job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps. He's done whatever it takes to serve and protect in a city built by ambition and corruption, where no one is clean - including Malone himself.
What only a few know is that Denny Malone is dirty: he and his partners have stolen millions of dollars in drugs and cash in the wake of the biggest heroin bust in the city's history. Now Malone is caught in a trap and being squeezed by the Feds, and he must walk the thin line between betraying his brothers and partners, the Job, his family, and the woman he loves, trying to survive, body and soul, while the city teeters on the brink of a racial conflagration that could destroy them all.
Based on years of research inside the NYPD, this is the great cop novel of our time and a book only Don Winslow could write: a haunting and heartbreaking story of greed and violence, inequality and race, crime and injustice, retribution and redemption that reveals the seemingly insurmountable tensions between the police and the diverse citizens they serve. A searing portrait of a city and a courageous, heroic, and deeply flawed man who stands at the edge of its abyss, The Force is a masterpiece of urban living full of shocking and surprising twists, leavened by flashes of dark humor, a morally complex and utterly riveting dissection of modern American society and the controversial issues confronting and dividing us today.
THE LAST GUY
The last guy on earth anyone ever expected to end up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Park Row was Denny Malone.
You said the mayor, the president of the United States, the pope—people in New York would have laid odds they'd see them behind bars before they saw Detective First Grade Dennis John Malone.
A hero cop.
The son of a hero cop.
A veteran sergeant in the NYPD's most elite unit.
The Manhattan North Special Task Force.
And, most of all, a guy who knows where all the skeletons are hidden, because he put half of them there himself.
Malone and Russo and Billy O and Big Monty and the rest made these streets their own, and they ruled them like kings. They made them safe and kept them safe for the decent people trying to make lives there, and that was their job and their passion and their love, and if that meant they worked the corners of the plate and put a little something extra on the ball now and then, that's what they did.
The ...
Intense! That's the word. Winslow's The Force rips through its four hundred pages with the breath-taking, slam-you-in-your seat intensity of a cop ride-along turned guns-blazing shoot-out...[T]he novel’s perfect in function. The pace runs at pursuit speed. Conflict is in-the-news real. Descriptions are artistic, from “the sweet, fetid richness” of New York City, streets, cafes, and apartment buildings; to characters, with Russo in pointed Italian shoes, Montague ever-present in a trilby, or Denny, dressed in all black hiding a Sig-Sauer, Beretta, and knife-in-a-boot...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Gary Presley).
Lee Child
Intensely human in its tragic details, positively Shakespearian in its epic sweep - probably the best cop novel ever written. Stephen King
The Force is mesmerizing, a triumph. Think The Godfather, only with cops. It's that good.New York City consists of five boroughs: Brooklyn, The Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. The latter is the home of Sgt. Denny Malone, the street-wise detective in Don Winslow's The Force. Denny may keep an apartment in Manhattan, but Staten Island is home. That's where he grew up. That's where he keeps his wife and kids safe.
Today, the billion dollar glitz of the modern National Football League is certainly familiar to the half-million residents of Staten Island, but there are probably only a few who realize Staten Island once had a professional National Football League team. The team was the Staten Island Stapletons. The Stapes, as they were called, made their debut on October 6th, 1929. They weren't much good,...
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