 The Force by Don Winslow. This book is read by Dion Graham. Cops are just people, she said irrelevantly. They start out that way, I've heard. Raymond Chandler, farewell my lovely. The last guy, the last guy on Earth anyone ever expected to end up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Park Road was Denny Malone. You said the Mayor, the President of the United States, the Pope, people in New York would have laid odds they'd seen them behind bars before they saw Detective First Grade Dennis John Malone. A hero cop, the son of a hero cop. A veteran sergeant in the NYPD's most elite unit, the Manhattan North Special Task Force. And most of all, a guy who knows where all the skeletons are hidden. Because he put half of them there himself. Malone and Russo and Billy-O and Big Monty and the rest made these streets their own, and they ruled them like kings. They made them safe and kept them safe for the decent people trying to make lives there. And that was their job, and their passion, and their love. And if that meant they worked the corners of the plate and put a little something extra on the ball now and then, that's what they did. The people, they don't know what it takes sometimes to keep them safe. And it's better that they don't. They may think they wanna know. They may say they wanna know, but they don't. Malone and the Task Force, they weren't just any cops on the job. You got 38,000 wearing blue. Danny Malone and his guys were the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. The smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, the best, the baddest, the Manhattan North Special Task Force. The Force blew through the city like a cold, harsh, fast, and violent wind, scouring the streets and alleys, the playgrounds, parks and projects, scraping away the trash and the filth, a predatory storm blowing away the predators. A strong wind finds its way through every crack into the project's stairwells, the tenement heroin mills, the social club back rooms, the new money condos, the old money penthouses. From Columbus Circle to the Henry Hudson Bridge, Riverside Park to the Harlem River, up Broadway and Amsterdam, down Lenox and St. Nicholas, on the numbered streets that span the Upper West Side, Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood. If there was a secret the Force didn't know about, it was because they hadn't been whispered about, or even thought of yet. Drug deals and gun deals, traffic and people and property, rapes, robberies and assaults, crimes hatched in English, Spanish, French, Russian, over collared greens and smothered chicken or jerk pork or pasta marinara or gourmet meals at five-star restaurants in a city made from sin and for profit. The Force hit them all, but especially guns and drugs, because guns kill and drugs incite the killings. Now, Malone's in lockup, the wind is stop blowing, but everyone knows it's the high of the storm. The dead quiet lull that comes before the worst of it. Denny Malone in the hands of the Feds? Not IAB, not the state's attorneys, but the Feds, where no one in the city can touch him. Everyone's hunkered down, shitin' bricks and waitin' for that blow, that tsunami, because with what Malone knows, he could take out commanders, chiefs, even the commissioner. He could roll on prosecutors, judges, shit, he could even serve the Feds the mayor on a proverbial silver platter, with at least one congressman and a couple of real estate billionaires as appetizers. So, as the word went out, then Malone was sitting in the MCC. People in the eye of the hurricane got scared, real scared, started to seek shelter even in the calm, even knowing that there are no walls high enough, no cellars deep enough. Not at one police, not at the criminal courts building, not even a Gracie mansion, or in the penthouse palaces lining Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. To keep him safe from what's in Denny Malone's head. If Malone wants to pull the whole city down around him, he can. Then again, no one's ever really been safe from Malone and his crew. Malone's guys made headlines. The Daily News, The Post, Channel 7, 4 and 2, filmin' 11 cops. Recognized on the street cops, the Mayor knows your name cops, comp seats at the garden, the meadowlands, Yankee Stadium and the shade, walk in any restaurant, bar, club in the city and get treated like royalty, cops. And of this pack of alphas, Denny Malone is the undisputed leader. Walks in any house in the city, the uniforms and the rookie stop instead. The lieutenants give him a nod. Even the captains know not to step on his shoes. Sample complete. Ready to continue?