{"id":6777,"date":"2017-08-01T06:38:16","date_gmt":"2017-08-01T10:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6777"},"modified":"2017-08-01T06:38:16","modified_gmt":"2017-08-01T10:38:16","slug":"the-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6777","title":{"rendered":"***The Force"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"NYPDBy Don Winslow, narrated by Dion Graham \u2013 For a while yet, perhaps every gritty, noir cop story set in urban America will be compared with the television series The Wire<\/em> in terms of realism, character development, and sheer storytelling power. (Dion Graham, who narrates the audio version of Don Winslow\u2019s much-anticipated new cop tale played a state\u2019s attorney in that series.)<\/p>\n

In both stories, the stultifying and morally questionable \u201cpowers that be\u201d 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\u2014\u201cda Force\u201d\u2014is a king. \u201cMalone and the Task Force, they weren\u2019t 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\u2014the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, the best, the baddest.\u201d So it\u2019s no surprise that all manner of people want to take him down.<\/p>\n

Winslow\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s tragedies; bold acts of selfless heroism; and, often, a meticulous deconstruction of how high-minded public servants go bad. This novel has all that.<\/p>\n

Expectations for The Force are high. Winslow\u2019s 2015 expos\u00e9 of drug trafficking, The Cartel<\/a><\/em>, was excellent. His plots snare and bind his characters ever more tightly. The main characters\u2014not only Malone, but his partners\u2014his best friend Phil Russo and Bill Montague, a.k.a. Big Monty\u2014are people you want to root for, so what if they\u2019re a little dirty?<\/p>\n

Winslow shows how corruption works, in detail, from the inside. That\u2019s why it\u2019s 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<\/em> too, but there it seemed warranted, since so many Americans are oblivious to the problems he exposed.<\/p>\n

But readers of The Force<\/em> 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<\/em> 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<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

Dion Graham\u2019s 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\u2019s stature and gifts could have done better.<\/p>\n

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com<\/a>.
\n<\/a>\"\"\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Don Winslow, narrated by Dion Graham \u2013 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[52,53,40,632,268,126,1],"tags":[1119,91,472,1120,99],"class_list":["post-6777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-criminal","category-fiction","category-police","category-politics","category-reading-2","category-uncategorized","tag-don-winslow","tag-new-york","tag-noir","tag-the-force","tag-urban-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Lj","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6777"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6777\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6779,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6777\/revisions\/6779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}