Review by New York Times Review
HO, HO, HO! Let Jolly Santa hand out his boring, politically correct presents to all the good boys and girls. Here comes Bad Santa with a sack of the year's best crime and mystery thrillers, full of psychos and siekos for the naughty kids. First to crawl out of the bag is Jo Nesbo's monstrous villain in the thirst (Knopf, $26.95), a serial killer who stalks his victims on Tinder, rips out their throats with dentures made of metal spikes and drinks their blood. The good citizens of "melancholic, reserved, efficient" Oslo are paralyzed with fear and loathing, but the murderer's bizarre M.O. alerts Harry Hole, Nesbo's gloomy Norwegian detective, that this repulsive killer is having fun with Harry, tempting him to come out and play. The crooked New York cops in Don Winslow's excellent police procedural, THE FORCE (Morrow/ HarperCollins, $27.99), have minds in the gutter and share a vocabulary as ripe as rotten fruit. But just because they're no-good crooks doesn't mean these roughnecks can't police their turf. They pull off the biggest heroin bust in memory, put down an all-out gang war and handle quotidian misdeeds like regular gentlemen. Their methods are extremely thoughtful and inventive; they just aren't entirely lawful. Of all the places where you really do not want to meet a couple of nut cases with rifles, a zoo full of "wild things in boxes" ranks high. Gin Phillips taps that primal fear in FIERCE KINGDOM (Viking, $25), a heart-thumping thriller about a mother who finds herself and her 4-year-old son running for their lives among cages of unhappy wildlife after two crack marksmen start hunting down zoo visitors like animals. Phillips's resourceful heroine gives new meaning to the term "tiger mom." Meet the great guys who work at Oasis Limo Services in the DRIVER (Dutton, $26). The plot of Hart Hanson's first novel is ragged, but his furiously funny storytelling voice is full of moral indignation on behalf of unstable war vets like Ripple, the dispatcher who lost both legs in Afghanistan and now draws violent cartoons all the livelong day, and Tinkertoy, a mechanical genius with a scary case of post-traumatic stress paranoia. Even Skellig, the levelheaded owner of the cab service, hears the voices of men he's killed in battle ("troubletroubletroublebadtrouble") while he's driving. With racial barriers slowly dropping in the 1950s, token black cops are badly needed on the Atlanta police force. But as Thomas Mullen lets it be known in LIGHTNING MEN (37lnk/Atria, $26), Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith are also valuable assets in neighborhoods where white residents are literally up in arms over the black families buying homes on their blocks. As the son of a Baptist minister, Boggs is a member of the black aristocracy, a beneficiary of "preacher money and a preacher house, even a preacher car." Black vs. White doesn't begin to cover the complexity of these diverse relationships. Ever since Harry Bosch was forced into retirement from the Los Angeles Police Department, Michael Connelly's tough-as-oldboots hero has been taking on cold cases for the San Fernando force, working from a makeshift office in the old drunk tank of the county jail. ("Sometimes I think I can still smell the puke.") In two kinds of TRUTH (Little, Brown, $29), Bosch goes undercover as an elderly oxycodone abuser to take down a gang of international racketeers who are moving prescription drugs in and out of the country by enslaving aged addicts desperate to feed their habits. That's pretty ugly - and a new one on us. Jack Reacher ("Bigfoot," to those awed by his 6-foot-5-inch, 250-pound bulk) is right where we want him in Lee Child's new novel, THE MIDNIGHT LINE (Delacorte, $28.99): on an endless ribbon of highway, hitching rides and serving as "human amphetamine" for tired truckers. A chance visit to "the sad side of a small town" leads Reacher on a quest to track down a criminal enterprise preying on wounded veterans, a scam that saddens our hero and makes him very, very angry. To the East Texas natives in Attica Locke's bluebird, bluebird (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26), Highway 59 is both a lifeline and an escape route. Everyone headed in or out of town makes a pit stop at Geneva Sweet's Sweets, including Darren Mathews, a righteous Texas Ranger working his way through every hamlet from Laredo to Texarkana, looking for the murderer of the black man and the white woman whose bodies were fished out of the muddy waters of the Attoyac Bayou. The plot has legs, and Locke's blues-infused idiom lends a strain of melancholy to her lyrical style. The great port of London churns with activity in Anne Perry's rich, if blood-splattered, Victorian mystery, an echo of MURDER (Ballantine, $28), which finds Commander William Monk of the Thames River Police hunting down the assassins of Hungarian immigrants who fled oppression only to be greeted with bitter hostility in their new home. "It's fear of ideas," Monk's wife, Hester, says. "Everyone you don't understand because their language is different, their food, but above all their religion." EARTHLY REMAINS (Atlantic Monthly, $25), Donna Leon's latest Venetian mystery featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, is one of her best - and one of her saddest - dealing with the relentless polluting of the great lagoon. "We've poisoned it all," mourns Davide Casati, an aged boatman who treats Brunetti to languorous tours of the floating islands on the graceful, gondola-like rowing boat he built with his own hands. MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 3, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It's rare for a writer to produce two career-defining masterpieces back-to-back, but that's exactly what Winslow has done by following The Cartel (2015) with The Force. In an era rife with racially motivated police brutality, Winslow has created what will likely become our quintessential cop novel, looking both at what cops do right and wrong with clear-eyed realism and passionate humanity. When this epic-scale narrative begins, Denny Malone, the detective who leads the NYPD's elite Manhattan North Special Task Force (Da Force), is sitting in a jail cell, stripped of gun and badge and accused of being a dirty cop. The tale then moves back and forward in time, showing how Malone and his team have leveled a full-frontal assault on drugs and guns in Manhattan North without regard to protocols, procedures, or, eventually, the law. Not only does Winslow detail how that cowboy approach has earned the grudging respect of some and the eternal enmity of others in Da Force's largely minority district but he also tracks the effect of the Job on Malone and his friends and the granular process through which something good becomes something very, very bad. Reminiscent of Joseph Wambaugh's The Choirboys (1975), Winslow's novel takes the theme of cops under pressure much further, exposing corruption at higher levels and suggesting that responsibility for the fire this time with which the book ends lies more in the penthouse than on the street. Grand in scope and equally grand in execution. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Social media is already buzzing about the arrival of The Force, and Winslow's new publisher will take full advantage of that through book-festival season and beyond.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Edgar-finalist Winslow (The Cartel) peers into the soul of modern America through the eyes of a supremely skilled and corrupt police officer, in this epic novel of devastating moral complexity. Dennis Malone, a veteran NYPD detective sergeant, leads the Manhattan North Special Task Force, an elite unit established to combat drugs, gangs, and guns. Keeping the citizens safe is often messy work and sometimes requires unorthodox methods to get results. Gradually, however, Malone and his crew have slipped over the edge, stealing millions in drugs and cash over the years, including a massive amount of heroin seized in the city's biggest-ever drug bust. Now the feds have built a case against Malone, and they threaten to take him down if he doesn't help bring in bigger players in the criminal food chain, even if it means betraying his partners. As the reader discovers, Malone's corruption is but a tiny part of a much larger system that extends into the highest reaches of New York's power structure, where the real business is done, and everyone on the chain takes a cut. Fans of modern masters such as Don DeLillo, Richard Price, and George Pelecanos will be richly rewarded. Agent: Shane Salerno, Story Factory. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
After more than a dozen acclaimed, under-the-radar novels, Winslow moved into the first rank of American thriller writers with his drug-war odyssey The Cartel. His latest offers a similarly epic take on the cop novel, though it lacks its predecessor's singular brilliance. Denny Malone, a veteran NYPD detective sergeant, stalks the streets of Upper Manhattan, knowing nothing happens or gets dealt without his knowledge or consent. The higher-ups have given his elite team, "Da Force," free rein to keep the peace, even if rules are bent and spoils pocketed along the way. In a city where someone's going to profit off the drugs and the violence, why shouldn't it be his team? Malone prides himself on loyalty and tradition, but after a multimillion-dollar heroin bust gets the attention of the feds, he's forced to make an unthinkable decision: to turn on his brother cops and rat on his beloved teammates. -VERDICT Winslow's writing, with its torrents of profane, single-sentence paragraphs, is as potent as ever, but his story's trajectory is familiar, particularly for fans of the show The Shield. Despite those reservations, this propulsive novel should be eagerly welcomed by readers of Ken Bruen. [See Prepub Alert, 12/12/16.]-Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Savage dope dealers, dirty cops, corrupt officials, and a few hapless civilians mix it up in New York City.After The Cartel (2015), Winslow follows the drug trade onto the streets. The Manhattan North Special Task Force is a lightly supervised assemblage of "the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, the best, the baddest" cops in the NYPD, and Denny Malone commands a happily representative task force squad: his boyhood pal Phil Russo; big, black Bill Montague, who dresses like an Ivy League professor; and Billy O'Neill, the youngest. The book opens with Malone in a federal lockuphow he got there unfolds in breakneck flashbacks told in the cadences and vocabulary of a cop's speech. The pivotal, but by no means the first, of his many indiscretions is skimming $4 million and 20 kilos of heroin from the scene of a major bust. He also executes the kingpin, and in the raid, Billy is killed. The narrative picks up five months later, and the legal and extralegal exploits of the task force are detailed. The reader is asked to admire the effectiveness of their policing while condemning their methodsJoseph Wambaugh did it better. Malone's brother, Liam, a firefighter, was killed on 9/11, and that horrific disaster for first responders forms a grim attitudinal backdrop to their days. Malone and the boys are dirty cops: they take and deliver payoffs, ignore the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, and administer crude vigilante justice. Drugs are gotten off the street, though some may go up their noses or into their lungs. Eventually Malone is trapped, caught on tape offering to broker a payoff to an assistant district attorney. He cuts a deal to name lawyers but not cops, but corrupt prosecutors and deceitful administrators confound him. His alternatives shrink; more deals are made and abrogated. Are Malone's crimes an inescapable consequence of his working conditions? Must the police break the law to keep the peace? By turns grim and giddy, this is a good read in the service of dark cops. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
