Review: "The Force" by Don Winslow

I have come to expect quite a bit of greatness out of author Don Winslow. The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, which put together I like to call the Keller/Barrera saga, is an astounding achievement on all fronts: of storytelling, of relevance and of monumental character arcs that treat its subject with the respect and gravity of a Shakespearean tragedy. They are meticulously researched with narratives laid out in one long immaculate line. The books are violent, with some scenes put forth honestly and with a willingness not to look away that some may find gratuitous. But I’d argue it serves a purpose and is never gratuitous. Like all great literature, the characters and scenes still rattle around in my brain, being easy to recall and reflect on months and years after finishing the book. And his new novel, the cop drama The Force, is just as good as those two other fantastic books. It is a smaller novel, clocking in at only 479 pages (The Power of the Dog and The Cartel being 560 and 625 respectively), but it is has all the qualities of both of those mammoth titles: it is heavily researched, with a list of names at the beginning of the book, all cops, who helped Winslow out with some of the more nuanced details of being a cop being a few pages long. And being shorter, it is a much tighter story and being set strictly in New York City, it is a much more relevant story. Denny Malone, the cop at the center of the novel, begins the story sitting in a jail cell and the weight of an entire city resting on his shoulders. Denny, along with his four man Task Force, run their prescient, and walk a fine line between protecting the city they live in and making moral compromise after moral compromise in trying to keep the city safe and make a little bit of money on their own. The majority of this book is about how all that slowly, tragically and horribly falls apart around Denny, from his team, more loyal than most brothers, Claudette, his newfound love and the stash of drugs that hold the promise of a better life and the key to his destruction. It is hard not to look at the Task Force and not see the Strike Team lead by Vic Mackey on The Shield, but the comparison is one of admiration and not criticism. Denny is a much more malevolent figure than Vic: he continually justifies his actions, and we even cheer him on during some of the more noble pursuits, but deep down, like most of the people in this book, he is bad person. Through the many plot twists, which floored me time and time again, this book asks much needed questions about the role of police in our lives, being both critical of the power they possess and the wrongs they can commit and being sympathetic to an impossible and impossibly hard job that is slowly becoming harder and less popular. But the story here is what makes this book special, as we watch Malone rise and fall, crumble and rebuild and try to save as much as he can. It is a staggering feat of storytelling, and another homerun from Winslow.

Rating: 5/5