You never doubt that The Force is telling you it like it is. I loved the telling details too: when the team skims a drug-dealer's cash, they each take a self-addressed envelope, seal up their share and pop it in a mailbox before they check the depleted haul in at the stationhouse.

The plot, once it kicks in, is well-made and continually surprising. The elaborate set-pieces are superbly staged and the labyrinthine relationships and dependencies between cops, attorneys, Feds and City Hall are fluently depicted ('real estate prices rise as crime falls'), as are the varieties and degrees of corruption. While not remotely in the same league as The Cartel, Winslow's masterpiece, The Force is a super-charged, kinetic, propulsive read. Then comped bottles of Cristal at the Cove Lounge and super-strong weed with Tre, the club owner, before they put Levin to bed and end the night rolling down Lenox Avenue: Malone, Russo and Monty, Irish, Italian and African-American, the stereo blasting and the windows open, all singing along to NWA: Then Madeline’s on Ninety-Eighth and Riverside, where the women are gorgeous, as they should be, at $2,000 a date. They leave 200 in cash on the table, because you never stiff a server or take change for a 20.īowling night they always get a town car and a driver. “It’s important that when the unit is out as the Unit, it dresses tight and eats steak.” The bill comes to over five bills for four, or would if they were charged. When Levin, the newbie, has a near miss, Malone calls bowling night: French cuffs, martinis, steaks at Gallaghers on Fifty-Second. The rapes and assaults are mostly gangbangers who are also slinging.” Most of the robberies are junkies and crackheads. Detective First Grade Dennis Malone runs the Manhattan North Special Task Force: “Our main mission is dope and guns, but the Task Force teams do what-the-fuck-ever we want, because it’s all related.

The force don winslow review