The Force : A Novel
Author(s): Don Winslow
Instant New York Times Bestseller
Best of 2017 - included on best-of lists by the New York Times, NPR, Barnes & Noble, Publisher's Weekly, LitHub, BookPage, Booklist, TheRealBookSpy.com, the Financial Times (UK) and the Daily Mail (UK)
“The Force is mesmerizing, a triumph. Think The Godfather, only with cops. It’s that good.”
— Stephen King
The acclaimed, award-winning, bestselling author of The Cartel—voted one of the Best Books of the Year by more than sixty publications, including the New York Times—returns with a cinematic epic as explosive, powerful, and unforgettable as Mystic River and The Wire.
Our ends know our beginnings, but the reverse isn’t true . . .
All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop.
He is “the King of Manhattan North,” a, highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of “Da Force.” Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest, an elite special unit given unrestricted authority to wage war on gangs, drugs and guns. Every day and every night for the eighteen years he’s spent on the Job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps. He’s done whatever it takes to serve and protect in a city built by ambition and corruption, where no one is clean—including Malone himself.
What only a few know is that Denny Malone is dirty: he and his partners have stolen millions of dollars in drugs and cash in the wake of the biggest heroin bust in the city’s history. Now Malone is caught in a trap and being squeezed by the Feds, and he must walk the thin line between betraying his brothers and partners, the Job, his family, and the woman he loves, trying to survive, body and soul, while the city teeters on the brink of a racial conflagration that could destroy them all.
Based on years of research inside the NYPD, this is the great cop novel of our time and a book only Don Winslow could write: 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. A searing portrait of a city and a courageous, heroic, and deeply flawed man who stands at the edge of its abyss, The Force is a masterpiece of urban living full of shocking and surprising twists, leavened by flashes of dark humor, a morally complex and utterly riveting dissection of modern American society and the controversial issues confronting and dividing us today.
Review(s):
“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.”
“A scorcher.”
“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!”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“(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.”
“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.”
ISBN: 9780062664433