Deja read ( )

Fast and entertaining. Not very deep characters ( )

This book kept me up at night, reading it, feeling Malone's frustration with the cards he is dealt and the problems he makes for himself. And there are many problems he makes for himself. This is a very honest look at the situation of the police and their relationship to the minorities they serve. Both sides are represented, but the police are more represented.

Denny Malone, the King of Manhattan North. What kind of guy is he? Denny Malone happens upon a young black boy in a tenement hallway in his precinct. He talks to the kid a little bit and happens to notice that the kid has welts and belt-marks on his back. After some prompting the boy tells him it was his mother's boyfriend. Malone asks the kid where he lives and takes him home where the boy's mother and her boyfriend are sitting at the table, eating. Malone proceeds to beat the boyfriend, break his wrist and tell him that if he is ever seen in Manhattan North again, he will face Malone. He throws out the boyfriend. The mother, who has been quiet throughout the ordeal, says, "Don't I deserve love, too?" Malone says, "Love your kid..."

And he's also the kind of guy who will execute a drug dealer and then take his drugs and money and split it between him and his partner and close friends. The drug dealer had ordered the execution of a family (including two kids) because the dad was a dealer who did something to anger his employer.

In Manhattan North the cops work with the mob, the Latino gangs and the black gangs to control them and make a buck or two within strict codes. Malone and Da Force (hated "Da" in that-too cutesy) will be the go-betweens when one gang wants to sell to another gang but hates them because of their color. That way everyone makes money.

Winslow expertly navigates a very fine line between realism and racism. Example-there is a black gang called the Spades and it's capitalized every time so it took me a minute to realize that Malone wasn't just calling African-Americans "spades", but referring to gang-members who belong to a gang that call themselves the Spades. These cops tease each other about their various ethnicities and no one gets angry, which I found authentic. Malone doesn't care what color anyone is, even though the racial epithets run rampant in this tour de force.These are the blue-collar guys I've known all my life. Except that they have power. Malone isn't more complicated than the average guy, but as a cop he has a lot more power over a lot more people. Malone has the intelligence and the ability to strategize, but he is still surprised when everything goes south and all his men are in jeopardy.

Writer nerd mechanics: This is told from Malone's point of view in a very readable, very authentic 3rd person voice. Winslow pulls off the present tense admirably. There are info-dumps, where it seems that the author dumped in paragraphs of quotes from cops in real life. It's obvious that Winslow did his research on this. ( )

A gritty and intense crime thriller following a corrupt NYPD detective as he struggles to maintain his grip on power and avoid the consequences of his actions. The Force sports a complex plot, characters of depth, and a brutally frank look at the dark side of law enforcement. Like King's It is to the horror genre, Winslow's The Force should be the police procedural classic of the 21st century. ( )

A relentless crime thriller. I haven't read any of Winslow's stuff before this, but I might have to change that now. Denny Malone is an intriguing and unforgettable central character (I hesitate to call him a "protagonist"). ( )