Amid all the drugs and guns and skyscrapers and cop bars, there's this shimmering image of an ancient tale hovering just at the edge of things. It's a weird thing when you first realize it, brilliant and almost subversive as you watch it play out across the pages. And the joke works because it is absolutely true. There's even a scene toward the back third, just before everything starts unraveling toward the bloody, cinematic conclusion, where two groups of furious, heavily-armed cops are meeting for an open-air parlay, and one of them makes a joke, that this is their Runnymede, where King John made peace with rebellious English barons by sealing the Magna Carta. There's turf, divvied up between mobsters and gangsters and the police - all of them lords and barons of their territory, ruling with violence, struggling to keep a status quo where everyone earns, everyone eats, and no wars break out. At many points throughout the novel, Denny Malone is referred to as 'the king of Manhattan North.' He refers to himself that way, and talks (often, internally and externally) about ruling the streets of his kingdom. And then he answers, with perfect, earned truth, 'Step by step.'Īn instant classic, an epic, a goddamn Wagner opera with a full cast and buckets of blood and smack and Jameson whiskey. 'How do you cross the line?' Denny asks himself. Paragraphs that break so fast your eye trips, falling to the next line (and the next and the next) before you know what's happening.

Denny, he's a cop - born to be, bred to be, Staten Island Irish with blue all over his family tree - and his voice is like a short panic run over broken ground. There's no trickery here, no multiple POV characters or bloated monologuing. His voice is the narrator's voice, commanding all past and all present. In his new novel, The Force, detective sergeant Denny Malone talks to himself a lot. There are rules, things you do and things you don't, and if the cop in your cop book can't talk to himself in his own head, how are the readers going to know that he's tortured? That he's a good man going bad (or a bad man going worse)? That he has hopes and dreams that extend beyond these streets and the barrel of this gun?ĭon Winslow knows this. Internal monologue is a staple in cop books.

'How do you cross the line? Step by step.' Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Force Author Don Winslow

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