We learn this in the first few breaths, so I am not spoiling anything for you. His latest, The Force, takes aim at the role of a police officer in a country that lives with the hypocrisy of needing and using more drugs and painkillers than the rest of the world combined yet labels it a moral failure instead of a mental health crisis.ĭenny Malone is New York’s number one cop, an apex predator, and he is dirty as hell. His epic The Cartel brings the horror of the drug war to life like no other work of art. If you haven’t read his thriller Savages, you are missing out on a prime piece of crime fiction built on an astute knowledge of drug cartels and a mastery of character. No matter if he writes about a silverback mobster, a New York cop, a Mexican journalist, or a woman drug lord who’s twice as ruthless to keep the wolves at bay, he inhabits his characters. My first Winslow was The Winter of Frankie Machine, about an old wiseguy who just wants to surf but gets pulled back into the life by a mobster’s kid who wants to make a name for himself. He said his chapters were short in the early days because he wrote on the train to and from work: a 21-minute ride. That sometimes it’s not the spoken lie but the unspoken truth that opens the door to betrayal.ĭon Winslow has a unique voice, one that’s partly shaped by public transit. His old priests might have told him that there are sins of commission and sins of omission, that it’s not always the things you do, but the things you don’t that cost you your soul. The Force by Don Winslow is 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.

The force winslow review