Instant New York Times BestsellerBest 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 KingThe acclaimed, award-winning, bestselling author of … 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—makes his William Morrow debut 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.
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A great book!!
A hard hitting story of dirty hero cops in NYC…drug culture has corrupted everyone but the hot dog vendors. And yet you keep pulling for them. A truly exceptional work.
I’ve been reading a lot of this author’s work lately. Compared to others in this genre, his characters are lacking in depth and fail to become real. His books are also very dark, even darker than James Lee Burke. The plotting is dark and Machiavellian, so much so that it requires a real exercise in suspension of disbelief in order to keep reading.
Been there, done that. You’ve seen this same plot in a dozen different movies and on every cop show ever made.
This book was not to my taste. Don’t get me wrong. The writing is good. The author CAN write. It’s just that I have a hard time caring of finishing a book (and I didn’t finish this one) when there isn’t one character in it that I like. Perhaps a few redeeming features for the anti-heroes would have helped. Again, this is just my taste and opinion. If you like a dark read this might be just the one for you.
This book did not appeal to me at all. I think men may be able to handle this better than most women.
Lots of F words did not like the book.
What a crummy way to live!
Plot and story good BUT way to much CUSSING!! This story could have been presented without all the CUSS words ………………….
A good cop book (but certainly not the greatest, as one review puts it). Characters and plot extremely well developed. The author takes gratuitous shots at the NRA with misleading characterizations early on in the book, showing an extreme liberal bias against the NRA, which is off-putting for the reader not looking for political screeds.
Great writing.
Seemed very realistic. Good dialogue.
Not necessarily correct or realistic, having had 34 years in Law Enforcement.
One of my top five books ever! Strongly recommended. Gritty police drama.
Kept me reading until there was nothing left to read.
The review from Stephen King says it all. A devastating book!
The book presents a heavy dose of what happens in large departments in the U.S. Had I written a book of this type, I would not have been as forthcoming. I was a law enforcement officer for 35 years. This book is not Pollyanna!
Loved it
Really good book. I certainly wasn’t expecting how good it was. Sad but uplifting in a twisted way. Action packed and edge of the seat stuff.
Brutal depiction of a crooked cop and his downward spiral into hell.