‘The Force’: A gritty, visceral tale of dirty cops
They rip off drug dealers, sell dope and hide evidence. They take bribes, commit perjury and sell justice. They extort, threaten and assault. They snort, pop, screw, cheat and kill.
They also pull dead babies from trashcans, lift scalded children from boiling tubs and find families hacked to death with machetes. They kick in doors, confront lunatics and render aid. They chase, shoot, and arrest. They scream, cry, bleed and die.
They are the wavering blue line of “The Force,” an elite NYPD unit at the center of Don Winslow’s searing portrayal of cops trying to protect and serve themselves in a world where nothing is black and white.
Sorry. There’s no good or bad here. You want your heroes uncompromised, unsullied? You like your narrative with little slices of truth, justice and the American way? Walk on by.
Winslow dispenses truth in bucketfuls of gritty realism. Justice is a bedtime story for rookies. And the American way is greed.
The Force lives by a code with one cynical rule that nobody honors: You never rat, don’t sell out your brothers. Until you do.
The keeper of the code is Detective First Grade Denny Malone, second-generation hero cop, the King of Manhattan North. He is the “Blue Knight” of this post 911 Joseph Wambaugh deconstruction. If Bumper Morgan is the finest fictional cop to walk the beat, Malone is his opposite. An antiMorgan with sleeve tats, a penchant for rap music and a Harlem mistress hooked on smack.
Winslow opens with a better introduction: “The last guy on Earth anyone ever expected to end up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Park Row was Denny Malone.”
By the end of the prologue, Malone’s team has raided a Lenox Avenue drug house, his partner is dead of an accidental overdose, a Dominican gangster is killed and the detectives have stolen 50 kilos of Mexican cinnamon heroin called Dark Horse.
So there you have it, an 11-page denouement. How they arrived at this moment, how four guys who joined the force to uphold the law and went so wildly wrong, is the backbone of this 480-page epic.
What follows is pure and delicious trope, masterfully he’s talking about getting caught, squealing, cutting deals. He tells himself he’ll never give up his partners.
Have you seen this before? Yes and no. The closest comparison is Robert Daley’s “Prince of the City,” the 1978 nonfiction book based on the exploits of NYPD narcotics detective Robert Leuci, who went from bad cop to undercover informant.
Is it coincidence that Winslow chose to make his cops kings? No more than finding Leuci (who died in 2015) credited in the book’s acknowledgments.
Call “The Force” Don Winslow’s Big Book of Police Corruption. Said with zero derision and plenty of admiration.
“The Force” is Winslow’s first book since the publication of “The Cartel” in 2015, which is, quite frankly, one of the 10 best crime books ever written. Jumble and Sudoku puzzles on 4D His bloody chronicle of America’s drug war was a literary achievement, fiction wrapped tight around journalism. But more than N.Y. Times puzzle on 4D
TSL.A. Times puzzle on 4D just a visceral retelling of the drug war, “The Cartel” was an attack on the system