A compelling ‘Force’ behind dirty cops Don Oldenburg
For Winslow’s ‘heroes,’ personal justice corrupts
Don Winslow’s intoxicating new crime thriller, The Force
(William Morrow, 479 pp., is a riveting ride-along with the Manhattan North Special Task Force, an elite NYPD unit commissioned to battle drugs, guns and gangs in upper Manhattan’s mean streets and projects.
In charge is veteran NYPD Detective Sgt. Denny Malone, a larger-than-life hero who started as a flatfoot with a gun and nightstick. Now he’s 38, a smart, hardened cop: “The King of Manhattan North.” He and his crack team’s street cred: tough, ruthless and fair.
So how does this epic tale begin with Malone in federal lockup? No one thought Malone would end up behind bars “except maybe God,” the narrator tells us, “and he wasn’t talking.” How good cops end up dirty is the compelling story Winslow tells through plot-building flashbacks detailing months of the Task Force’s shakedowns, busts, heroics and criminal behavior.
To protect the community, Malone and his partners do whatever it takes. Malone picks up bad habits keeping Manhattan North in line. Besides popping Dexedrine, he handles cash envelopes for favors and administers his own justice. He bails on his Staten Island life, wife and kids. He thinks he’s got the “best job in the whole freakin’ world” — until it isn’t.
What sends the scales of justice crashing down on Malone is the night he and his partners raid a Harlem heroin mill, execute
the drug lord, pocket $4 million and smuggle 20 kilos. Retirement and kids’ college money are important, but that crossed the line big time. The best-selling author of The
Cartel, a 2015 epic about narco warfare in Mexico, and 2005’s
The Power of the Dog, about the DEA’s war on drugs, Winslow writes sweeping, thoroughly researched, crime-fiction sagas ripped from reality. This story occurs against the backdrop of community outrage from highprofile police shootings of young black men nationwide. “These days, every cop’s got a bull’s eye on his back,” Malone tells himself, “… you go to work each day with the whole world thinking you’re a murdering racist.”
Malone’s not a murdering racist, he’s a murdering realist. In the end, squeezed by the Feds, this dirty hero cop is disturbing proof, Winslow makes clear, that graft and corruption leak down to the street from the highest levels of a broken justice system. As in
The Cartel, a poignant non-fiction baseline threads through this novel, leaving readers to wonder how much of it is true.