Mesmerizing, a triumph. Think The Godfather , only with cops. It’s that good.
Intensely human in its tragic details, positively Shakespearean in its epic sweep—probably the best cop novel ever written.
Don Winslow’s New York copy novel The Force is a scorcher, and if his sources are on the level it’s time for another Knapp Commission.
(A) shattering New York cop epic… The pace is kept up by the Winslow way with words, which almost entirely defies being quoted here, either because of the slang (Elmore Leonard league) or because of the everyday obscenities that lace every funny line.
Winslow brings incisively-researched details, gut-wrenching plotlines, and infinite heart to his all-too-real, highly compassionate tale.
Don Winslow’s summer blockbuster, The Force , is ready-made for Hollywood… A big, fat book of fast-moving fiction… Riveting and scary — in a lot of ways.
Don Winslow’s novel The Force isn’t just one of the great New York City cop novels ever written. It is one of the great New York City novels ever written.
There won’t be a better cop novel this year than The Force by Don Winslow. Not next year, or the year after that, either.”
Don Winslow’s The Force is the best book of 2017 so far, period. Did you ever read a book you had a sense was going to become a classic? That’s what Don Winslow’s had me thinking well before I flipped the last page.
A gut punch of a new cop thriller. . . . Once the author, a former investigator, starts tightening the screws of this by stunning drama, it has you unrelentingly in its grip.
If you read only one crime novel this summer, it is going to have to be “The Force” by award-winning veteran writer Don Winslow.
A piercing, profane, morally complex epic.
The Shield meets The Departed in Don Winslow’s The Force , one of the best cop dramas ever written, and the first novel we’ve ever scored a perfect 10/10 on our rating scale.
Magnificent… muscular and lyrical, free-flowing and complex, it delivers punch-in-the-guts plot twists.
The immersion into the world of the NYPD is so brutal and honest that it’s difficult to imagine that Winslow was never a policeman.
Once every few years, a book comes along that stands head and shoulders above its genre. Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River was one; Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy... was another. Don Winslow’s The Force ... is such a book.
Winslow is the most fearless chronicler of the chaos and violence along the U.S.-Mexico border...who has written what could be the War and Peace of the War on Drugs.
Supercop and Everycop, Malone symbolizes the conflicts that corrode — and, Mr. Winslow suggests, often define — today’s policing. This book is about the intersection of greed and need… The Force is gripping… magisterial and raw.
Winslow’s writing, with its torrents of profane, single-sentence paragraphs, is as potent as ever.
So smoking hot that this reviewer kept imagining that the pages were blistering and that there was steam rising up from the cover… If you read just one book this summer, make it The Force .
Winslow spent years researching this novel, and it shows....A superb crime novel.... Exciting, entertaining and enlightening.
Nobody exposes the underbelly of American society like Don Winslow – a modern master who holds up a mirror to New York policing, showing the bravery, loyalty, honour and corruption.
It’s rare for a writer to produce two career-defining masterpieces back-to-back, but that’s exactly what Winslow has done.… Winslow has created what will likely become our quintessential cop novel, looking both at what cops do right and wrong with clear-eyed realism and passionate humanity.
Booklist (starred review)
A scorcher.
New York Times Book Review
Mesmerizing, a triumph. Think The Godfather , only with cops. It’s that good.” — Stephen King
“Intensely human in its tragic details, positively Shakespearean in its epic sweep—probably the best cop novel ever written.” — Lee Child
“A scorcher.” — New York Times Book Review
“Shocking authenticity is the lifeblood of Don Winslow’s The Force. I stopped everything I was doing to read it straight through. Detective Sergeant Denny Malone takes us on a searing journey through the corruption that lies at the heart of our justice system. I wish I’d written it!” — Greg Iles, author of Mississippi Blood
“Don Winslow’s New York copy novel The Force is a scorcher, and if his sources are on the level it’s time for another Knapp Commission.” — Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review
“Don Winslow’s novel The Force isn’t just one of the great New York City cop novels ever written. It is one of the great New York City novels ever written.” — Mike Lupica, New York Daily News
“Don Winslow’s summer blockbuster, The Force , is ready-made for Hollywood… A big, fat book of fast-moving fiction… Riveting and scary — in a lot of ways.” — Neely Tucker, Washington Post
“(A) shattering New York cop epic… The pace is kept up by the Winslow way with words, which almost entirely defies being quoted here, either because of the slang (Elmore Leonard league) or because of the everyday obscenities that lace every funny line.” — Janet Maslin, New York Times
“Winslow brings incisively-researched details, gut-wrenching plotlines, and infinite heart to his all-too-real, highly compassionate tale.” — Daneet Steffens, Boston Globe
“There won’t be a better cop novel this year than The Force by Don Winslow. Not next year, or the year after that, either.” — Linwood Barclay
“It’s one of the most daring and explosive books of summer, grabbing readers by the front of the shirt and dragging them into a world where honor and wrongdoing are mismatched partners… (It has) a sardonic, streetwise voice — like a pissed off conscience, telling a cautionary tale.” — Anthony Breznican, Entertainment Weekly
“The pressure on Malone becomes so intense it makes Henry Hill’s paranoia in “Good Fellas” look like a mild case of OCD… What makes The Force unique among police procedurals is that it’s not the story of a rogue cop with a code… but a sneakily subversive post-Ferguson thriller.” — Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times
“A brilliant novel, rich in language, conflict, setting, and character. It resonates deeply with realism, honesty, and sheer magnetism. Fans of “The Godfather,” “Mystic River,” “The Wire,” and “The Departed” will absolutely love this book.” — Mark Rubinstein, Huffington Post
“The immersion into the world of the NYPD is so brutal and honest that it’s difficult to imagine that Winslow was never a policeman.” — Jeff Ayers, Washington Post
“Part The Godfather , part The Wire , The Force is a Molotov cocktail of cops and corruption, where good guys are also bad guys, and police malfeasance isn’t just about skimming money off drug busts—it’s about ... the corruption that comes when trying to do the right thing.” — Abigail Jones, Newsweek
“Winslow 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.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Don Winslow’s The Force is the best book of 2017 so far, period. Did you ever read a book you had a sense was going to become a classic? That’s what Don Winslow’s had me thinking well before I flipped the last page.” — Jon Land, Providence Journal
“A page-turner that also manages to dive into deeper issues… Yet what truly sets Winslow apart, aside from his gut-punch prose and deep understanding of the criminal worlds he inhabits, is his ability to perceive the greater truth behind the guns and drugs and death.” — Stayton Bonner, Rolling Stone
“Don Winslow’s intoxicating new crime thriller, The Force is a riveting ride-along with the Manhattan North Special Task Force, an elite NYPD unit… As in The Cartel , a poignant non-fiction baseline threads through this novel, leaving readers to wonder how much of it is tragically true.” — Don Oldenburg, USA Today
“Just fantastic . Like can’t-put-it-down, can’t-get-the-voices-out-of-your-head fantastic. An instant classic, an epic, a goddamn Wagner opera… basically Game of Thrones without the dragons. The Wars of the Roses played out with New York City cops and robbers.” — Jason Sheehan, NPR
“It’s rare for a writer to produce two career-defining masterpieces back-to-back, but that’s exactly what Winslow has done.… Winslow has created what will likely become our quintessential cop novel, looking both at what cops do right and wrong with clear-eyed realism and passionate humanity.” — Booklist (starred review)
“Once every few years, a book comes along that stands head and shoulders above its genre. Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River was one; Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy... was another. Don Winslow’s The Force ... is such a book.” — Bruce Tierney, BookPage
“Supercop and Everycop, Malone symbolizes the conflicts that corrode — and, Mr. Winslow suggests, often define — today’s policing. This book is about the intersection of greed and need… The Force is gripping… magisterial and raw.” — Carlo Wolff, Pittsburg Post-Gazette
“Magnificent… muscular and lyrical, free-flowing and complex, it delivers punch-in-the-guts plot twists.” — Marcel Berlines, The Times (UK)
“Sprawling and visceral.” — Financial Times (UK)
“[Winslow’s] prose moves with the power of a locomotive and the precision of a Porsche, making hairpin turns designed to keep adrenaline junkies turning the pages.” — Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News
“If you read only one crime novel this summer, it is going to have to be “The Force” by award-winning veteran writer Don Winslow.” — C.F. Foster, Florida Times-Union
“Incendiary…. Winslow is a master at exposing how corruption and bureaucracy strangle well-intentioned law enforcement, and he doesn’t shy away from issues of race, culture, poverty and the dark economics on which a city thrives.” — Connie Ogle, Miami Herald
“The plot... shines with looks deep inside New York City, inside racial strains, inside institutional turf wars - and inside a cop’s conscience.... The best damned crime book so far this year.” — Harry Levins, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“A mashup of a hundred-dirty cop movies and true-crime exposes, reimagined and repurposed into one indelible storyline. Winslow takes these well-worn themes, bends them to his considerable will and comes up with something fresh… Heartbreakingly beautiful and unforgiving.” — Robert Anglen, Arizona Republic
“The author brings an intoxicating combination of passion, authenticity and grandeur to the crime thriller, expanding the very limits of the form… Riveting, infuriating, and ultimately deeply moving.” — Bilge Ebiri, Village Voice
“Winslow spent years researching this novel, and it shows....A superb crime novel.... Exciting, entertaining and enlightening.” — Paul Davis, Washington Times
“A gut punch of a new cop thriller. . . . Once the author, a former investigator, starts tightening the screws of this by stunning drama, it has you unrelentingly in its grip.” — Lloyd Sachs, Chicago Tribune
“A piercing, profane, morally complex epic.” — John Wilkens, San Diego Union-Tribune
“Breathtaking... Packed with detail and told with majestic prose... This is without question among the finest ever police novels.” — Geoffrey Wansell, Daily Mail (UK)
“A superlative cop thriller....The Force can be seen as a meticulously researched nonfiction book in fictional disguise: every scene adds another detail to its panoramic picture of a criminal justice system permeated by corruption, cronyism and lies.” — John Dugdale, Sunday Times (London)
“A compelling, profane, powerful saga… I can’t wait for the movie. It’s got Scorsese written all over it.” — Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail (UK)
“Riding high on the acclaim from his 2015 novel, The Cartel ... Winslow turns to the streets of New York in this dark novel about an NYPD special task force led by Denny Malone, whose brother died as a first responder on 9/11.” — Tom Beer, Newsday best summer books
“So smoking hot that this reviewer kept imagining that the pages were blistering and that there was steam rising up from the cover… If you read just one book this summer, make it The Force .” — Vick Mickunas, Dayton Daily News
“The Force is intoxicating....Winslow keeps the surprises coming and the narrative churning.... A literary coup de force.” — Tom Mayer, Mountain Times
“Caught between the desperation of the poor and the cynicism of the rich the lead character of Don Winslow’s The Force embodies the searing conflicts that define 21st century New York. The boom shrewdly suggest damnation can be a form of salvation for a man and even a city.” — Nelson George
“Nobody understands the disaster of corruption better than Don Winslow. The Force exposes the dawning horror of how it eats into the best intentions.” — Val McDermid, #1 Bestselling Author of Out of Bounds
“The Shield meets The Departed in Don Winslow’s The Force , one of the best cop dramas ever written, and the first novel we’ve ever scored a perfect 10/10 on our rating scale.” — Ryan Steck, TheRealBookSpy.com
“Winslow’s writing, with its torrents of profane, single-sentence paragraphs, is as potent as ever.” — Michael Pucci, Library Journal
“Nobody exposes the underbelly of American society like Don Winslow – a modern master who holds up a mirror to New York policing, showing the bravery, loyalty, honour and corruption.” — Michael Robotham, Bestselling Author of Life or Death
“The Force is a Seventies-style Sydney-Lumet-directed cop story, dropped into the streets of today, that prove not to be that different, and given an epic sweep.” — MysteryPeople Pick of the Month
“Secures Winslow’s place beside the likes of Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, Daniel Woodrell, George Pelecanos, Thomas H. Cook, and James Ellroy – writers who have turned the American crime novel into major works of literature.” — Bruce DeSilva’s Rogue Island on The Force
Praise for Don Winslow: “Winslow’s drug war version of The Godfather ...a big, sprawling, ultimately stunning crime tableau. . . . A magnum opus. . . . Don Winslow is to the Mexican drug wars what James Ellroy is to L.A. Noir.” — Janet Maslin, New York Times
“Winslow’s drug war version of The Godfather ...a big, sprawling, ultimately stunning crime tableau...A magnum opus...Don Winslow is to the Mexican drug wars what James Ellroy is to L.A. Noir.” — Janet Maslin, New York Times on The Cartel
“A Game of Thrones of the Mexican drug wars, a multipart, intricately plotted, blood-soaked epic that tells the story of how America’s unquenchable appetite for illegal drugs has brought chaos to our southern neighbors and darkened our own political and criminal culture.” — Will Dana, Rolling Stone on The Cartel
“Clearly one of the most ambitious and most accomplished crime novels to appear in the last 15 years, THE CARTEL will likely retain that distinction even as the twenty-first century grinds on.” — Bill Ott, Booklist on The Cartel
“Hugely hypnotic new thriller...the pace and feel of an exploded documentary...a brilliant and informative work of fiction about a nightmare world that flourishes in the bright light of day.” — Alan Cheuse, NPR Books on The Cartel
“Don Winslow is one of the most durable and important voices in American crime fiction. His examinations of character and corruption turn the narco wars into a relentless, bloody opera.” — Nic Pizzolatto, Creator, Writer and Executive Producer of HBO’s True Detective on The Cartel
“Don Winslow delivers his longest and finest novel yet in THE CARTEL . This is the War and Peace of dopewar books. Tense, brutal, wildly atmospheric, stunningly plotted, deeply etched.” — James Ellroy on The Cartel
“The Power of the Dog and THE CARTEL , by Don Winslow: I’m totally swept up. You can’t ask more fo emotionally moving entertainment.” — Stephen King on The Cartel
“Don Winslow’s THE CARTEL is the most important crime saga of the millennium...This is reporting and expose built around an intricate plot, finely etched characters and whip-crack dialogue. Storytelling that matters.” — Robert Anglen, Arizona Republic on The Cartel
“Sensationally good, even after the near-perfection of The Power of the Dog . Less of a sequel than an integral part of a solid-gold whole.” — Lee Child on The Cartel
“Winslow is the most fearless chronicler of the chaos and violence along the U.S.-Mexico border...who has written what could be the War and Peace of the War on Drugs.” — Erik Hedegaard, Men’s Journal on The Cartel
“THE CARTEL is a gut-punch of a novel. Big, ambitious, violent and widely entertaining, Don Winslow’s latest is an absolute must-read.” — Harlan Coben on The Cartel
“Winslow has delivered two of the most emotionally resonant novels in the past decade, The Power of the Dog and its epic conclusion, THE CARTEL ...his rapid-fire story hits you like bullets from an AK-47.” — Ivy Pochoda, Los Angeles Times on The Cartel
“High-octane...The righteous indignation that fuels Winslow’s tale of cops, cartels, and the near-apocalyptic havoc they can create is addictive.” — Clark Collis, Entertainment Weekly on The Cartel
It’s rare for a writer to produce two career-defining masterpieces back-to-back, but that’s exactly what Winslow has done.… Winslow has created what will likely become our quintessential cop novel, looking both at what cops do right and wrong with clear-eyed realism and passionate humanity.
Booklist (starred review) on The Force
The Force is a relentless heart-stopping, page-turning tour de force, filled with unforgettable villains and heroes... It is Don Winslow’s magnum opus, destined to become a classic.
Intensely human in its tragic details, positively Shakespearian in its epic sweep - probably the best cop novel ever written.
In addition to being the most exciting, suspenseful, Machiavellian book I have read this year, The Force, Don Winslow's nineteenth novel, could serve as the set text for an entire course on ethics. In its pages notions of right and wrong, justice and law, integrity and duplicity, professional duty and personal obligation are dissected, extrapolated, and rearranged in every sort of macabre permutation. Blue-eyed, six-foot-two, thirty-eight-year-old Detective Sergeant Denny Malone is the Staten Island–born hero-cop son of a hero-cop father and the leader of New York's elite Manhattan North Special Task Force. Tough, smart, and committed, the four-man "pack of alphas" are "the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent" of the city's 38,000-member police force. They are were "Da Force," blowing "through the city like a cold, harsh, fast, and violent wind, scouring the streets and alleys, the playgrounds, parks, and projects, scraping away the trash and the filth, a predatory storm blowing away the predators." All crime is their province, but drugs and guns are their special targets and it is drugs and guns that have landed Malone where we first meet him: behind bars, a calamity that has taken eighteen years to develop and almost 500 pages to explore. Manhattan North Special Task Force is made up of Malone, in whose voice filtered through a behind-the-eyeballs third person the story is told; Phil Russo, his best pal from Staten Island; and the trilby-wearing, cigar-chomping Bill Montague, a.k.a. Big Monty. They have recently lost a fourth member, "Billy O," killed during a raid, and he has been replaced by Dave Levin, a man who has a lot to learn (and accept) about "the Job," as they call it. The veterans Malone, Russo, and Monty are honorable men by their own lights and have been frustrated by their inability to nail the big boys in the drug-and-gun trade, the men who preserve their territory through beatings, mutilations, and murders. It is only a matter of Realpolitik, then, to cook up phony reasons for entering apartments without warrants, plant guns on people they know to be criminals, or "testilie" in court in order to put the bad guys away. The men are honorable, too, as they maintain with increasing elasticity, in accepting the gratitude of the community, gravitating from taking small freebies (coffee and donuts) to larger ones (meals and tickets) to accepting fatter and fatter envelopes of cash for various missions, on to pocketing thousands of dollars secured during drug raids. Is this wrong? Malone, finally confronting a big mess of his own making, examines his once-flexible conscience: "Told yourself it was different because you were robbing drug dealers instead of banks." Even the ultimate: absconding with several million dollars' worth of cocaine and selling it off to be peddled on the streets the Task Force is supposed to police, fits – barely into the code. After all, the money will be used for their children's college and for the survivors of their dead comrade. They're "doing the right thing." The one unforgivable breach of the code is ratting on another cop, and the most grievous version of this is to rat on your partners. It is a thing of horrifying beauty to see how Winslow sets up a nightmarish sequence of traps and snares to place Malone in a situation that would seem to demand it. After years of fearing NYPD's investigative Internal Affairs Bureau, Malone gets nabbed by the feds, and pretty soon he's playing a fast-paced, down-and-dirty game of hardball with New York City's power brokers, their "faces full of wealth, grit, cynicism, greed and energy." That this fine novel will be a movie is not in doubt. It is filled with exhilarating details of weaponry, court maneuvers, and New York's lowlife, and is punctuated by blood-rousing action scenes. It is also leavened along the way with jokes and nicely cynical wisecracks. ("When the pope came to NYC, Malone wanted to arrest him.") But above all, Winslow brings the same mastery of the anatomy of corruption to this book that he brought to the Mexican drug trade and our ruinous "war on drugs" in The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, his brilliant duo of narco-thrillers. Laying bare the intertangled ganglia of criminal enterprise, law enforcement, the justice system, and politics, he displays a deep and unsavory knowledge of how things work in NYC, from the distribution of street territory among various ethnic criminal gangs to the running of the "Iron Pipeline," whereby guns from southern states with negligible gun laws make their way up Interstate 95 into the arsenals of northern crime bosses and onto the streets. Finally and, if I may say so, gloriously he illustrates the sanitized involvement of real estate moguls, judicial officials, and the mayor's office in the whole dirty business. And, even if the novel's end, a melodramatic Götterdämmerung, is not entirely believable, it is perfectly satisfying.Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963.
Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers
The Barnes & Noble Review
Don Winslow's New York cop novel The Force is a scorcher, and if his sources are on the level it's time for another Knapp Commission…Like so much else in the story…Malone's methods are thoughtful and inventive.
The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio
"How do you cross the line?" asks the main character in The Force, Don Winslow's shattering New York cop epic about an elite task force leader who's a hero until he's not. The simple answer is, "Step by step." But this boisterous, profane book isn't big on simple answers. The Force recalls Sidney Lumet's great New York police films (Serpico, Prince of the City ) and makes their agonies almost quaint by comparison. Winslow's novel takes place in 2017, but he doesn't frame it as a time of good cops and bad cops, black or white. He paints a realistic tableau of police privilege, pragmatism, racial bluntness, street smarts, love of partners and loyalty to what they call the Job…The pace is kept up by the Winslow way with words, which almost entirely defies being quoted here, either because of the slang (Elmore Leonard league) or because of the everyday obscenities that lace every funny line.
The New York Times - Janet Maslin
★ 04/10/2017 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. (June)
Fast-moving…The action—a lot of it related in one- or two-sentence paragraphs that rocket you through the tale—is, as you might expect, cinematic. It’s often funny, ironic, and tense.”
Intensely human in its tragic details, positively Shakespearian in its epic sweep—probably the best cop novel ever written.”
#1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child
Mesmerizing, a triumph. Think The Godfather , only with cops. It’s that good.”
#1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King
A stunner of a cop novel.”
There’s a kind of magic that occurs and enhances both story and listening experience when a masterful narrator reads a fine novel, and Graham’s dazzling performance of Winslow’s gritty and provocative The Force is a perfect example…Brilliantly read by Graham, this is one of the finest audiobooks you’re likely to hear this year or next.”
Booklist (starred audio review)
Narrator Dion Graham sounds like a native of any of the neighborhoods that make up the Manhattan North police special operations area. He does white, black, and Latino cops and Staten Island, Harlem, and Bronx accents—all so smoothly you never notice the transitions but also never lose track of the character he’s voicing. The nonstop drama and violence are perfectly choreographed through his impeccable timing.”
Winslow expertly ratchets up the tension…His mastery over his material makes the novel compulsively readable in spite of its epic scope.”
"[A] rigorously researched, powerhouse crime novel…You’ll definitely want to pick up this compelling, gritty story filled with antiheroes, jaded cops, and misguided Robin Hoods.”
BookPage (A Private Eye July Pick)
Trust me when I tell you that you gotta read this book…It is just fantastic . Like can’t-put-it-down, can’t-get-the-voices-out-of-your-head fantastic. An instant classic, an epic, a goddamn Wagner opera.”
Books like this come around maybe once in a generation or so. It’s also the only book we’ve ever scored a perfect 10/10 on our rating scale. Winslow’s gritty, spellbinding look into the life of a corrupt NYPD police officer is unlike anything else in circulation right now. It’s raw, it’s honest, and its the type of book that only Don Winslow could pull off. If you read one book this year, it has to be The Force.”
A molotov cocktail of cops and corruption.”
The Force is a riveting ride-along with the Manhattan North Special Task Force…Pitch perfect since this gritty crime drama’s narrative channels Chandler’s hard-boiled voice, except with today’s jargon rather than the ’40s…Winslow writes sweeping, thoroughly researched, crime-fiction sagas ripped from reality…[and] a poignant nonfiction baseline threads through this novel, leaving readers to wonder how much of it is tragically true.”
USA Today (4 out of 4 stars)
A visceral listening experience that thrums with grit and tension.”
A Game of Thrones of the Mexican drug wars, a multipart, intricately plotted, blood-soaked epic that tells the story of how America’s unquenchable appetite for illegal drugs has brought chaos to our southern neighbors and darkened our own political and criminal culture.
Nobody understands the disaster of corruption better than Don Winslow. The Force exposes the dawning horror of how it eats into the best intentions.”
It’s one of the most daring and explosive books of summer, grabbing readers by the front of the shirt and dragging them into a world where honor and wrongdoing are mismatched partners… (It has) a sardonic, streetwise voice — like a pissed off conscience, telling a cautionary tale.
Hugely hypnotic new thriller...the pace and feel of an exploded documentary...a brilliant and informative work of fiction about a nightmare world that flourishes in the bright light of day.
High-octane...The righteous indignation that fuels Winslow’s tale of cops, cartels, and the near-apocalyptic havoc they can create is addictive.
Caught between the desperation of the poor and the cynicism of the rich the lead character of Don Winslow’s The Force embodies the searing conflicts that define 21st century New York. The boom shrewdly suggest damnation can be a form of salvation for a man and even a city.
A superlative cop thriller....The Force can be seen as a meticulously researched nonfiction book in fictional disguise: every scene adds another detail to its panoramic picture of a criminal justice system permeated by corruption, cronyism and lies.
THE CARTEL is a gut-punch of a novel. Big, ambitious, violent and widely entertaining, Don Winslow’s latest is an absolute must-read.
Harlan Coben on The Cartel
Clearly one of the most ambitious and most accomplished crime novels to appear in the last 15 years, THE CARTEL will likely retain that distinction even as the twenty-first century grinds on.
The Force is intoxicating....Winslow keeps the surprises coming and the narrative churning.... A literary coup de force.
A page-turner that also manages to dive into deeper issues… Yet what truly sets Winslow apart, aside from his gut-punch prose and deep understanding of the criminal worlds he inhabits, is his ability to perceive the greater truth behind the guns and drugs and death.
Breathtaking... Packed with detail and told with majestic prose... This is without question among the finest ever police novels.
The plot... shines with looks deep inside New York City, inside racial strains, inside institutional turf wars - and inside a cop’s conscience.... The best damned crime book so far this year.
[Winslow’s] prose moves with the power of a locomotive and the precision of a Porsche, making hairpin turns designed to keep adrenaline junkies turning the pages.
Incendiary…. Winslow is a master at exposing how corruption and bureaucracy strangle well-intentioned law enforcement, and he doesn’t shy away from issues of race, culture, poverty and the dark economics on which a city thrives.
Secures Winslow’s place beside the likes of Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, Daniel Woodrell, George Pelecanos, Thomas H. Cook, and James Ellroy – writers who have turned the American crime novel into major works of literature.
Bruce DeSilva’s Rogue Island on The Force
The Power of the Dog and THE CARTEL , by Don Winslow: I’m totally swept up. You can’t ask more for emotionally moving entertainment.
Stephen King on The Cartel
Don Winslow delivers his longest and finest novel yet in THE CARTEL . This is the War and Peace of dopewar books. Tense, brutal, wildly atmospheric, stunningly plotted, deeply etched.
James Ellroy on The Cartel
Sensationally good, even after the near-perfection of The Power of the Dog . Less of a sequel than an integral part of a solid-gold whole.
Sprawling and visceral.
A compelling, profane, powerful saga… I can’t wait for the movie. It’s got Scorsese written all over it.
Just fantastic . Like can’t-put-it-down, can’t-get-the-voices-out-of-your-head fantastic. An instant classic, an epic, a goddamn Wagner opera… basically Game of Thrones without the dragons. The Wars of the Roses played out with New York City cops and robbers.
Don Winslow’s intoxicating new crime thriller, The Force is a riveting ride-along with the Manhattan North Special Task Force, an elite NYPD unit… As in The Cartel , a poignant non-fiction baseline threads through this novel, leaving readers to wonder how much of it is tragically true.
Riding high on the acclaim from his 2015 novel, The Cartel ... Winslow turns to the streets of New York in this dark novel about an NYPD special task force led by Denny Malone, whose brother died as a first responder on 9/11.
Don Winslow is one of the most durable and important voices in American crime fiction. His examinations of character and corruption turn the narco wars into a relentless, bloody opera.
Part The Godfather , part The Wire , The Force is a Molotov cocktail of cops and corruption, where good guys are also bad guys, and police malfeasance isn’t just about skimming money off drug busts—it’s about ... the corruption that comes when trying to do the right thing.
“The Force is a Seventies-style Sydney-Lumet-directed cop story, dropped into the streets of today, that prove not to be that different, and given an epic sweep.
MysteryPeople Pick of the Month
The author brings an intoxicating combination of passion, authenticity and grandeur to the crime thriller, expanding the very limits of the form… Riveting, infuriating, and ultimately deeply moving.
The pressure on Malone becomes so intense it makes Henry Hill’s paranoia in “Good Fellas” look like a mild case of OCD… What makes The Force unique among police procedurals is that it’s not the story of a rogue cop with a code… but a sneakily subversive post-Ferguson thriller.
A mashup of a hundred-dirty cop movies and true-crime exposes, reimagined and repurposed into one indelible storyline. Winslow takes these well-worn themes, bends them to his considerable will and comes up with something fresh… Heartbreakingly beautiful and unforgiving.
Winslow has delivered two of the most emotionally resonant novels in the past decade, The Power of the Dog and its epic conclusion, THE CARTEL ...his rapid-fire story hits you like bullets from an AK-47.
Secures Winslow’s place beside the likes of Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, Daniel Woodrell, George Pelecanos, Thomas H. Cook, and James Ellroy – writers who have turned the American crime novel into major works of literature.
Bruce DeSilva's Rogue Island on-The Force
High-octane...The righteous indignation that fuels Winslow’s tale of cops, cartels, and the near-apocalyptic havoc they can create is addictive.
Entertainment Weekly on The Cartel
Winslow has delivered two of the most emotionally resonant novels in the past decade, The Power of the Dog and its epic conclusion, THE CARTEL ...his rapid-fire story hits you like bullets from an AK-47.
Los Angeles Times on The Cartel
Don Winslow’s THE CARTEL is the most important crime saga of the millennium...This is reporting and expose built around an intricate plot, finely etched characters and whip-crack dialogue. Storytelling that matters.
Arizona Republic on The Cartel
Hugely hypnotic new thriller...the pace and feel of an exploded documentary...a brilliant and informative work of fiction about a nightmare world that flourishes in the bright light of day.
Clearly one of the most ambitious and most accomplished crime novels to appear in the last 15 years, THE CARTEL will likely retain that distinction even as the twenty-first century grinds on.
A Game of Thrones of the Mexican drug wars, a multipart, intricately plotted, blood-soaked epic that tells the story of how America’s unquenchable appetite for illegal drugs has brought chaos to our southern neighbors and darkened our own political and criminal culture.
Rolling Stone on The Cartel
The Shield meets The Departed in Don Winslow’s The Force , one of the best cop dramas ever written, and the first novel we’ve ever scored a perfect 10/10 on our rating scale.
The Force is a relentless heart-stopping, page-turning tour de force, filled with unforgettable villains and heroes... It is Don Winslow’s magnum opus, destined to become a classic.
New York Journal of Books
This mystery made me feel as if I were back in Washington Heights. And if you’re a stranger to New York City, you’ll get a feel for some of what makes up this Jove among the great cities of the world. But don’t allow it to color your view of its police and politicians—this really is fiction. Narrator Dion Graham sounds like a native of any of the neighborhoods that make up the Manhattan North police special operations area. He does white, black, and Latino cops and Staten Island, Harlem, and Bronx accents—all so smoothly you never notice the transitions but also never lose track of the character he’s voicing. The nonstop drama and violence are perfectly choreographed through his impeccable timing. It’s hard, it’s violent, it’s dirty, but you won’t put it down. M.C. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
2017-04-04 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.