Category Archives: Criminal

Award-winning Listens

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Once the nominees and winners for the many, many awards in the crime/mystery/thriller genre are out, I listen to some of the ones I haven’t read. A talented narrator can really put a story into your head! Here are five I’ve heard lately, all (except one) with excellent narration. Three are nominees for Anthony Awards, which will be announced later this year.

*****Bearskin

Written by James A McLaughlin, narrated by MacLeod Andres – Oddly, Bearskin had some of the same appeal as the very different Where the Crawdads Sing, because part of the narrator’s challenge is dealing with a heavy dose of the natural world. Rice Moore is hiding out in an Appalachian Virginia nature preserve, living pretty much off the grid and hoping an assassin from the Mexican drug cartel whose younger brother he killed doesn’t find him. Meanwhile, he must deal with bear poachers, motorcycle outlaws, and an interesting parade of Old Dominion miscreants. Winner: 2019 Edgar Award for Best First Novel; Nominee: 2019 Anthony Award for Best Novel

*****November Road

In November Road, written by Lou Berney, narrated by Johnathan McClain – President Kennedy has been shot and New Orleans player Frank Guidry realizes the errand a local crime boss sent him on is connected to that crime. It sounded simple: drive this sky-blue Cadillac Eldorado to Dallas and park it in a particular place. It was the assassin’s getaway car. Now Guidry is supposed to dispose of the vehicle and rightly worries he’ll be disposed of next. Meanwhile, an Oklahoma housewife leaves her alcoholic husband and hits the road with her two daughters, never expecting to meet a man like Guidry. Winner: 2019 Left Coast Crime Award for Best Mystery Novel and a “Best Book of the Year” by at least 13 publications; Nominee: 2019 Anthony Award for Best Novel

****House Witness

Written by Mike Lawson, narrated by Joe Barrett – A powerful member of Congress has a secret: years ago his mistress bore him a son. When that son is shot dead in a Manhattan bar, he sends his fixer, Joe DeMarco, to make sure the culprit—son of a wealthy businessman—goes to jail. The case in House Witness should be a slam-dunk. There were five witnesses, after all. But as the witnesses start disappearing, the prosecutor suspects a campaign to get rid of them. She enlists DeMarco in a desperate cat-and-mouse game with a beautiful sociopath. Nominee: Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel

****The Chalk Man

Written by C J Tudor, narrated by Euan Morton. Years ago, in a small English town, a tight-knit gang of four twelve-year-olds communicated with each other via coded messages chalked on the sidewalk. One day a strange chalk message leads them to the body of a missing girl and a teacher–The Chalk Man–is blamed. Thirty years on, Eddie drinks too much, fuzzing his thinking about the new appearance of chalk men and the mysterious letter he and each of his friends have received. Is he creating these messages in a drunken blackout? When one of the four dies, Eddie must find out what happened so long ago in order to save them all. Winner: 2019 International Thriller Writers’ Award for Best First Novel; Strand Magazine Award for Best Debut Novel

***Jar of Hearts

Written by Jennifer Hillier, narrated by January LaVoy – In Jar of Hearts, sixteen-year-old Georgina Shaw’s boyfriend, Calvin James, kills her best friend, and buries the dismembered corpse in the woods behind Geo’s house. Twenty years later, Angela’s body is found, and Calvin is convicted of her murder, but he soon escapes from prison. Geo is incarcerated for five years, derailing her lucrative career and high-profile engagement. As she is about to be released, new bodies are found in the same woods. Calvin is the chief suspect, and Geo may be the next victim. This thriller loses a star mainly because the narration didn’t work for me. The print book might be a better choice. Winner:2019 International Thriller Writers’ Award for Best Hardcover Novel; Nominee: 2019 Anthony Award for Best Novel

Photo: John O’Nolan, creative commons license

****No Way to Die

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ancient China

By PA De Voe – If you want a total escape from Brexit or US or European politics, PA De Voe’s second-in-series Ming Dynasty Mystery, No Way to Die, will take you back to late 1300s China. As a devoted fan of the Judge Dee mysteries of Robert van Gulik, set six hundred years earlier in the Tang Dynasty, I was delighted to find De Voe’s well-crafted series.

The prose is deceptively simple. No lengthy descriptions, just enough information to let you picture the scene—a style in keeping with both the era in which the stories are set and the heavily verb-dependent Chinese language.

Women’s doctor (and woman doctor) Xiang-hua is asked to serve as coroner to determine whether the mangled body of a stranger found in the village herbalist’s pig pen got there through foul play. Alas, the pig had made a bit of a meal of the man before his body was removed. Numerous males of the community are concerned the sight of the mangled corpse may be too much for the young Xiang-hua. But she does not shrink from the task. Trained as a healer by her grandmother, Xiang-hua is determined to fulfill her obligations (striking a feminist note that resonates in the 21st century). It’s tough, but she’s in possession of herself well enough to discover the dead man, muddy and bloody, had been stabbed in the back.

The local officials want to know the victim’s identity and, if possible, who stabbed him, before they have to report the crime to higher authorities. If they fail to find out, it will likely to bring down the wrath of the bureaucracy, never a pleasant outcome in ancient China, as punishments were plentiful and harsh. This is a prime example of how De Voe uses 700-year-old realities to create situations that adhere to one of the basic memes of modern crime stories: the ticking clock.

The investigation enables a fascinating trip back to a colorful and simpler time, and though the culture was so different, human emotions and motivations are the same across eons. De Voe’s training as an anthropologist and her advanced degree in Asian studies mean that what she writes carries an authority based on deep knowledge of that long-ago culture and society. I’ll be looking forward to more of her excellent tales!

Seasoning Dinner with Crime: Second Course

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Forensic psychologist Louis Schlesinger of John Jay College of Criminal Law spoke to the NY chapter of Mystery Writers of America after dinner last week. Yesterday, I summarized his points about staging a homicide scene and undoing a murder—both aspects of criminality that writers may find useful in their diabolical plotting. Here’s more.

Foreign Objects

Schlesinger has written about foreign object insertions, a topic he considered not suitable to delve into in a postprandial talk, except to say that about half are not discovered until autopsy and the moths found in the throats of The Silence of the Lambs killer’s victims were not realistic. Why not? I wonder. He’s published an article on this topic, and if you’re super-curious, you can access the full article here.

Serial and Sexual Homicides

Serial and sexual homicides often involve rituals and follow a pattern—a “signature.” The murder alone is not psychologically sufficient to fulfill the killer’s intent. Creating any kind of an elaborate crime scene tableau requires time, which increases the risk of apprehension. Taking this extra risk shows how important that aspect of the crime is to him.

Recall Douglas Preston’s true-crime book, The Monster of Florence, about a series of 16 (at least) murders that took place in north Italy between 1968 and 1985. The killer’s victims often had complicated wounds that would have taken some time to inflict, yet as I recall, the bodies were found in well frequented lovers’ lanes. It was a mystery how he got away with it for so long. (Preston’s book describes the horribly botched investigation masterminded by prosecutor Giuliano Mignini. Over the course of Mignini’s “investigation,” he prosecuted some 20 individuals, all of whom were subsequently acquitted. If his name rings a bell, Mignini was also responsible for the mishandling of the case against Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito.)

But just because a serial killer has a signature, he may vary it occasionally, depending on circumstances. These variations crop up anywhere in the series of killings and can take many forms, making identification of all the victims in a challenge for your fictional investigator.

Psychopathic serial killers are typically of average intelligence, Schlesinger said, with Ted Bundy the exception that proves the rule. What they’re very smart about is masking their pathology. Maybe that’s why a killer’s neighbors and co-workers always say, “He seemed like such a normal average guy!”

Trends

Schlesinger pointed to several trends of interest to crime writers. Advances in emergency medicine that have helped save injured military personnel on the battlefield have been imported to our city hospitals. Many people whose injuries would have been fatal a few years ago now can be saved. That’s the good news, partly responsible for holding murder rates down.

The bad news is that, despite more police and better analytic techniques, only about 60 percent of murder cases are cleared by an arrest. It isn’t that the police aren’t doing a good job. Back when most murders occurred between people who knew each other, police investigations had something to go on. Today, the increases in random shootings, drive-by killings, drug killings, and gang warfare mean that, absent a confession, the responsible party is forever a question mark. And, they lack the dramatic possibilities of a 20-year feud between neighbors, a wronged lover, or jealous sibling.

*****The Last Act

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By Brad Parks – In an author’s note, Parks reveals the book was motivated by a real-life episode. Between 2004 and 2007, the U.S. mega-bank Wachovia failed to use appropriate money-laundering controls and cleansed at least $378 billion dollars from the Mexican drug cartel Sinaloa, reaping billions of dollars in fees. While the bank ultimately received a fine, modest compared to its gains, “no Wachovia executive faced criminal charges, nor served a single day in prison.” Wachovia was subsequently bought by Wells Fargo, where the practice has continued.

But can Parks’s sense of outrage translate into fiction without becoming polemical? Absolutely. His unlikely protagonist is Tommy Jump, a former child star, small in stature but aging out of his career in musical theater and still too young for character roles. He’s at loose ends, ending a gig as Sancho Panza in The Man of LaMancha, when he’s approached by an old high school buddy, now an FBI agent. He offers Tommy a deal.

The FBI wants the actor to pose as a felon and infiltrate the minimum-security Federal Correctional Institution in Martinsburg, West Virginia, where convicted banker Mitchell Dupree is confined. As a bank executive, Dupree helped a Mexican drug cartel launder more than a billion dollars, and has hidden away a trove of evidence, which the FBI hopes can bring the cartel to its knees. But the documents are Dupree’s insurance policy. If anything happens to him or his family, they will be released to the authorities. So he’s not sharing.

They want Tommy to find out where they’re hidden. It will be the acting job of his career. No one at the prison, not even the warden, will know he’s not a real prisoner, because secrets have an inconvenient habit of leaking. He’ll have six months to befriend Dupree and discover where the documents are. In return, he’ll be at least $150,000 richer. Tommy’s out of work, his pregnant girlfriend is an artist with no regular income. They don’t want to think of themselves as people tempted by money, but they are.

As Tommy, now Pete, enters prison, author Parks does a terrific job describing his mental state and coping mechanisms, and the strategies he uses to befriend Dupree. You get a strong sense not just of the physical environment, but of the power structure and the people within it.

That’s the set-up. I won’t say more about plot, because you should discover for yourself the agonizing twists Parks has in store. As every major character launches some competing smokescreen, this is a book you won’t be able to put down.

Above photo: PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Cybersecurity: What the Experts Say

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If only I were as clever as Brad Parks who took his outrage over the pass given to Wachovia and Wells Fargo Bank execs who laundered many millions of dollars for a Mexican drug cartel (and they’re still at it) and turned it into a fantastic new thriller, The Last Act (my review here). What you’ll read below has the seeds of innumerable great and terrifying stories, but when I read it, I start spitting. These quotes were a handout for my Great Decisions group, a discussion program sponsored by the Foreign Policy Association

 “Our adversaries and strategic competitors will increasingly use cyber capabilities—including cyber espionage, attack, and influence—to seek political, economic, and military advantage over the United States and its allies and partners. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea increasingly use cyber operations to threaten both minds and machines in an expanding number of ways—to steal information, to influence our citizens, or to disrupt critical infrastructure.” Daniel R. Coats, Director of National Intelligence statement to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as he presented the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of worldwide threats, 29 Jan 2019.

“Few Americans realize the extent to which foreign intelligence services are stealing our most important secrets.” And “China is without question the number one counterintelligence threat facing the United States.” James Olson, former CIA Chief of Counterintelligence

“The Russian intelligence services, the inheritors of the legacy of their Soviet forebears, are our inexorable adversaries. They have at one time or another penetrated every significant organization and agency in the U.S. Government and, as evidenced by their recent efforts to undermine American democracy, are the most professionally proficient intelligence adversaries we confront.” Mark Kelton, former CIA Deputy Director for Counterintelligence

“Foreign cyber criminals will continue to conduct for-profit, cyber-enabled theft and extortion against U.S. networks.” And “Terrorists could obtain and disclose compromising or personally identifiable information through cyber operations, and they may use such disclosures to coerce, extort, or to inspire and enable physical attacks against their victims.” Daniel R. Coats

“The sheer acceleration in the number of attacks, and their rapidly changing goals, is one of several warning signs that we all are living through a revolution, playing out at digital speed.” David E. Sanger, The Perfect Weapon

“We cannot afford to protect everything to the maximum degree, so we’d better figure out what cannot fail.” Thomas Donahue, Senior Analyst, Center for Cyber Intelligence

Read More

I highly recommend Sanger’s The Perfect Weapon, P.W. Singer’s Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media, and if a well-constructed fictional scenario holds more appeal, P.W. Singer and August Cole’s 2015 near-future thriller, Ghost Fleet.

Photo: openDemocracy, creative commons license

*****101

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By Tom Pitts – Book publicists are fond of the awkward adjective “unputdownable,”but in the case of Tom Pitts’s new California crime thriller, this enthusiastic description is wholly justified. Those familiar with California will recognize 101 as the highway that runs the length of California from Los Angeles—where it’s part of the world’s busiest and most nightmarish freeway interchange—north to the Oregon border and beyond. Pitts’s book focuses on that northern bit, from the Bay Area up to Humboldt County, where a different kind of traffic is all-important: weed.

The book is set in mid-2016, six months before California voters will legalize marijuana, and the impending vote has made the Humboldt County growers more paranoid than usual. They’re accustomed to warding off rustlers and junkies and deer and water-thieves, but unsure how to arm themselves for a massive market shift. Pitts’s description of the steep hillside partly covered in redwoods and brambles and the long, rutted dirt track up to where the nervous growers live is so vivid you could almost choke on the dust of their ATVs.

Vic Thomas runs one of these hillside growing operations, out of the sight of most people, which is exactly how he likes it. Twenty years before, he and a woman he’d never met before, Barbara Bertram, witnessed a horrible crime and, in self-defense, meted out a little on-the-spot justice. The experience bonded them forever. The police totally misunderstood what went on in that charnel-house and have been trying to track down Barbara and Vic ever since.

The story opens with a middle-of-the-night call from Barbara. She tells Vic her son Jerry is in trouble again, and she wants to send him to Vic so he can lie low awhile among the marijuana growers. Vic can’t tell her no. Alas, Jerry is a serial screw-up with less sense than Vic’s dogs.

Vic is not pleased when he discovers that Jerry and his girlfriend Piper stole a considerable amount of cash from a Russian who runs a Bay Area weed club. His name is Vlad—“Vlad the Inhaler”—and he and his mobsters are determined to get their money back and make an example of Jerry.

When Piper finds her way up the hill to Jerry’s “hideout,” Vic recognizes that his unwelcome guest can’t keep his mouth shut. He’s even more alarmed when he realizes Piper’s stepfather is the head of the Dead BBs, a vicious outlaw motorcycle gang. Vlad has a financial relationship with the BBs, which makes them equally determined to find Jerry and Piper and reclaim the money. The stepfather considers Jerry completely expendable and Piper only slightly less so. Pitts shifts the narrative point of view frequently, so you know not only what Vic is thinking, but also what Vlad and the Dead BBs are up to. You’re never in doubt about the danger heading up the 101 toward Vic, Jerry, Piper, and anyone else who gets in the way.

With three sets of determined antagonists—the Russians, the Dead BBs, and the cops—looking for some combination of Jerry, Piper, and Vic, the opportunities for mayhem expand exponentially, and Pitts has deftly orchestrated the chase. There’s no time here for literary flourishes, maybe just a dash to the fridge for a beer, right in step with the denizens of 101. AMAZON LINK HERE.

*****Wrecked

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razor wire fenceBy Joe Ide, narrated by Sullivan Jones –Joe Ide is a master at conveying distinctive personalities and subcultures, and Sullivan Jones brings them vividly to life. In his newest book, Ide deftly weaves together his principal plotline and engaging subplots into a masterful tale of escape, revenge, pursuit, and retribution.

As in Ide’s previous two books, IQ and Righteous, the story centers on East Long Beach investigator and righter-of-wrongs Isaiah Quintabe and his sometime friend—and in this book, new business partner—Juanel Dodson. Isaiah is called IQ not only because those are his initials, but also because he’s a brilliant strategist, who saves situations with brainpower more often than firepower.

Neighbors in his low-income community need a burglar caught or an ex-husband warned off? Isaiah’s their man. A school club needs help with a bully? Isaiah again. Unfortunately, these clients pay him in roof repairs, cakes and pies, and a promised handknit reindeer sweater. Once, a live chicken. These exchanges do not pay the bills, and Dodson plans to change all that. The slivers of insight Ide provides about the East Los Angeles community create an almost tangible sense of place.

In front of the local art supply store, Isaiah spots the woman he’s attracted to—Grace Monorova. Tongue-tied, he lets his gray pit bull Ruffin make the initial contact. Grace is great with the dog, but her reaction to Isaiah isn’t nearly as warm. Unexpectedly, she calls him one night to ask for help finding her mom, Sarah, missing for a decade. She pays him with one of her paintings, to Dodson’s disgust.

It emerges that Sarah is the target of a trio of ex-military who participated in the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison and the CIA operative who egged them on, Stan Walczak. Bad as the photos were that documented the depraved treatment of Iraqi prisoners, there are worse photos out there, and Sarah has them. She’ll sell them to Walczak for a million dollars. He has that kind of cash, but his scorched-earth modus operandi won’t let him buy them back. He wants her dead. Grace too, if necessary. And, if he interferes, Isaiah.

Meanwhile, Isaiah’s business partner Dodson decides to take care of a different situation himself, without putting Isaiah wise. The old case involves the 21st century Malaprop of hip-hop, Junior, “who sounds like he swallowed a dictionary sideways” and brings Dodson’s former girlfriend Deronda into the story in full whackdown mode. Dodson’s reactions to new fatherhood and his live-in mother-in-law left me grinning. Jive-talking, slick operator though this father is, baby Micah has obviously seized control of the household.

While author Ide captures the sometimes skewed thought processes and humor of all his characters and Jones delivers them with spot-on narration, Dodson may be the sentimental favorite of them both.

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****The Cold Summer

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Giovanni Falcone tree

Memorial tree for Giovanni Falcone; Dedda71, creative commons license

By Gianrico Carofiglio, translated by Howard Curtis – The Cold Summer is a fascinating police procedural involves the amputation of one small arm of the Mafia in Apulia, a region that constitutes the heel of Italy’s boot. Marshal Pietro Fenoglio is a carabinieri officer in the region’s capital, Bari, investigating the kidnapping and death of the young son of local mafia leader Nicola Grimaldi.

Speculation is that rivalries within the ranks of Grimaldi’s organization precipitated the kidnapping, as it’s one of a wave of occurrences linked to organized crime sweeping the area. “Probably the most respected and certainly the most intelligent” of Grimaldi’s lieutenants, Vito Lopez, has disappeared. His wife and son have disappeared, too,which suggests the family is in hiding and makes Lopez a prime suspect in the kidnapping. Certainly, the Grimaldi family believes Lopez is the culprit. The growing rift in the Grimaldi organization could be a way to bring the family down, if only Fenoglio can figure out how to do it.

The story is set in mid-1992, the “cold summer,” infamous in Italian law enforcement. First came the murders of prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, his wife, and three members of their police escort in a bomb blast outside Palermo. Less than two months later, prosecutor Paolo Borsellino and five members of his police escort also were murdered. These real-life events shake up not only Carofiglio’s fictional characters, but the Italian people as well, leading to a crackdown on the mafia and new, harsher penalties for convicted mafiosi. Carofiglio thus places his story in an era that was particularly dangerous and high-stakes for police, prosecutors, and criminals alike.

Carofiglio’s characters are believable, flawed, and interesting. The carabinieri, never free from the oppressive danger around them, move forward cautiously, but with purpose. Fenoglio is especially articulate in his musings about the “grey areas” in society in which many people, including his colleagues and even himself and his investigation, often operate.

To everyone’s surprise, Lopez turns himself in. He knows he’s a dead man without police protection and maybe even with it. The interviews of him by Assistant Prosecutor Gemma D’Angelo are presented as question-and-answer transcripts, devoid of editorial comment, gesture, or any emotion. This dry style is remarkably effective and makes Lopez’s confession even more powerful by its simplicity. Despite the many crimes he confesses to, he is adamant in denying involvement in the Grimaldi boy’s kidnapping. On that crime, Fenoglio and Pellecchia appear back to square one.

When reading a book that has been translated, you can never be certain how closely the style adheres to the original. In this case, Howard Curtis has produced an English-language text that reads exceedingly smoothly, yet manages to convey the aura of the original Italian. You never feel as if you are reading a translation, but the original.

Carofiglio is an award-winning novelist and a Bari native. He has long experience as a prosecutor specializing in organized crime, which informs this well-crafted novel beginning to end. It’s a pleasure to read and to spend a little time (safely) in Fenoglio’s perilous world.

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****Countdown to Osaka

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Osaka, lanterns, Japan

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By Joe Hefferon – Today we see more crime fiction set in Japan, Korea, and other countries of the Far East, with Western authors also probing these cultures’ perplexities. Joe Hefferon’s latest novel, Countdown to Osaka, is an exciting addition to the mix. His main characters—female yakuza assassin Koi and French illegal gun merchant Le Sauvage—are larger-than-life, but such interesting characters you gladly accept their unerring skills in martial arts and criminal strategy.

In the beginning of the story, Koi is disillusioned with life in the organized crime syndicate to which she belongs and tired of killing at its behest. She wants out. But there is no easy out of the yakuza. In a satisfying hero’s journey move, her mentor in the organization, an “aging jackal named Hayato,” gives her one last mission—kill Le Sauvage and stop his plan to steal a fortune in Japanese gold, lost since the fall of the Shoguns. No one is sure where it is, but Le Sauvage, it seems, is closing in on it.

If she fails, Hayato will kill her. Of course, Le Sauvage and his heavy guard of former French Foreign Legionnaires and special operations soldiers may beat him to it. If she succeeds, she can have her freedom. So he says. In the distance, a dogged Interpol inspector lags several steps behind the action.

Koi is a tough cookie on the outside, though another dimension of her is revealed through her devotion to her dying mother. It is her mother’s wish that she free herself from the yakuza, which adds to Koi’s determination. Koi’s mother had many struggles raising her half-European daughter as an unmarried woman. Many of the novel’s situations are influenced by the social and cultural mores of Japan. Although I am not an expert on Japanese culture, these descriptions and sometimes subtle reflections of what is and is not possible in daily behavior ring true.

Le Sauvage’s network soon realizes an “Asian woman” is after him, but she manages to outwit them for a while, including seeking refuge in the apartment of a theater-loving gay bartender in Nice, Le Sauvage’s home turf. Hefferon includes numerous comic touches in this encounter, and you may regret when it races to a close. In fact, many of the secondary characters—including members of the Frenchman’s gang and a dissolute British scholar of Asian literature—are interesting in their own right and not just in place to fill out a scene.

The treasure hunt moves back and forth from Saigon to France to Osaka, and while multi-time-zone jet-setting is sometimes not especially believable, Koi and the yakuza on one hand and Le Sauvage and his team on the other have almost unlimited funds, keeping the travel at least financially plausible.

The clues to where the Japanese gold may have been hidden are scattered, some in a quite unexpected place. Puzzle elements are a staple of mystery fiction, and the way the team puts that aspect of the story together is complicated and lost me a couple of times, but nevertheless great fun. Hefferon has deployed the tropes of crime and mystery fiction with exceeding skill here, creating characters to believe in and a crackerjack plot, but don’t be lulled into thinking you know how it will all end.

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***The Force

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NYPD Detective badgeBy Don Winslow, narrated by Dion Graham – For a while yet, perhaps every gritty, noir cop story set in urban America will be compared with the television series The Wire in terms of realism, character development, and sheer storytelling power. (Dion Graham, who narrates the audio version of Don Winslow’s much-anticipated new cop tale played a state’s attorney in that series.)

In both stories, the stultifying and morally questionable “powers that be” come up against a loose cannon Irish cop. In this case, Detective First Grade Denny Malone whose turf is Manhattan North, which includes Harlem and the Upper West Side. Malone, a chief detective on the Manhattan North Special Task Force—“da Force”—is a king. “Malone and the Task Force, they weren’t just any cops on the Job. You got thirty-eight thousand wearing blue, Denny Malone and his guys were the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent—the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, the best, the baddest.” So it’s no surprise that all manner of people want to take him down.

Winslow’s novel starts with a spectacular heroin bust Malone and his team make, and the consequences of that flow through the city, the justice system, and the lives and careers of all his characters. The essential question of the book is, whom do you trust? And Malone questions even himself.

A good cop novel is a thing of beauty. It shows every side of human nature; people struggling against poverty, the odds, themselves; the human comedy and life’s tragedies; bold acts of selfless heroism; and, often, a meticulous deconstruction of how high-minded public servants go bad. This novel has all that.

Expectations for The Force are high. Winslow’s 2015 exposé of drug trafficking, The Cartel, was excellent. His plots snare and bind his characters ever more tightly. The main characters—not only Malone, but his partners—his best friend Phil Russo and Bill Montague, a.k.a. Big Monty—are people you want to root for, so what if they’re a little dirty?

Winslow shows how corruption works, in detail, from the inside. That’s why it’s puzzling that he brings the key officials together for a scene near the end of the book in which Malone climbs up on a soapbox and recites their malefactions. The author tended toward preachiness in The Cartel too, but there it seemed warranted, since so many Americans are oblivious to the problems he exposed.

But readers of The Force likely know plenty about official corruption. For starters, Winslow has just spent more than four hundred pages showing it to them. Bleak as The Wire was, some cops tried to do the right things the right way; some characters redeemed themselves after grievous errors; some city institutions actually tried to make life better for citizens. In The Force, everyone is compromised. Some good can only be accomplished by doing a lot of bad. While you may believe widespread corruption exists, it takes a high level of cynicism to think it is the only social force at work. This book should have been better.

Dion Graham’s narration provides distinct voices, good humor, and an urgent delivery that carried me through to the end, which probably would have been a little harder to accomplish in the print version. The book itself was a disappointment. An author of Winslow’s stature and gifts could have done better.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.