Broken

February 24, 2020
The six crime novellas in this disappointing collection from bestseller Winslow (the Cartel trilogy) lack the superior plotting and forceful prose of the author’s best work. The opening of the weak title story suggests that the focus will be on New Orleans 911 dispatcher Eva McNabb, the wife of a tough, abusive ex-cop, and the mother of two current police officers, but it shifts to the two sons. Jimmy McNabb’s disruption of a major meth shipment has tragic unintended consequences that set his family on a path toward bloody revenge in a story that prioritizes action over depth of characterization. Other selections offer nothing particularly new. In “Crime 101,” a dogged police lieutenant pursues a thief targeting jewelry couriers in California; in “The San Diego Zoo,” the one light-hearted entry, a humane cop tries to disarm an escaped chimp that managed to get its hands on a gun without injuring the primate. Readers should be prepared for graphic violence and staccato prose (“Harold’s shotgun is at his hip./It blasts the would-be shooter into the wall./The doors close”). Winslow fans will hope for a return to form next time. Agent: Shane Salerno, Story Factory.

March 15, 2020
Six crime novellas from Winslow, who pays homage to Steve McQueen, Elmore Leonard, and Raymond Chandler. The world is a broken place, thinks Eva McNabb, a 911 dispatcher in New Orleans in the title novella, and "you come out broken." Her sons, Danny and Jimmy, are cops, and Jimmy is "as sensitive as brass knuckles." When he and his partner stumble on a mountain of meth, gunfire and heartbreak follow. In Crime 101, a jewel thief named Davis notes the basics of successful crime--"keep it simple," for example. He never strays far from "the 101," his beloved California Highway 101. When Davis jacks $1.5 million in diamonds, Lt. Lou Lubesnick tries to identify and capture him, and it all comes down to this: "What would Steve McQueen do?" There are so many good lines in these yarns. How could the reader resist The San Diego Zoo's opener: "Nobody knows how the chimp got the revolver"? This story is especially funny: A good cop becomes the department's laughingstock after disarming Champ the chimp. Lowlife Hollis Bamburger once turned in a term paper with the Wikipedia heading still on it. Even Superman and Spartacus take a hilarious turn. Meanwhile, the characters in Sunset and Paradise spend a lot of time surfing or thinking about surfing. A bail bondsman looks for a heroin-addicted surfing legend, and a woman in Hawaii thinks Peter, Paul, and Mary were Jesus' parents. Each storyline will keep readers entertained with wit, humor, and occasional sadness. Finally, in The Last Ride, a Border Patrol agent simply wants to return one Salvadoran girl to her mother. The tale is sad and powerful as it comes back to the theme that everyone is broken somehow. A great collection of short crime fiction.

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March 20, 2020

Crime novelist Winslow (The Force; "Cartel" trilogy) expands his repertoire with a collection of crime novellas, some of them loosely connected. The first three entries are the strongest. "Broken" has a cop family exacting revenge when their youngest member is tortured and killed by a drug lord. "Crime 101" is a pleasurable cat-and-mouse game played by a jewel thief and an erudite cop, Lou Lubesnick. Lubesnick makes an appearance in the comical "The San Diego Zoo," which has a hapless patrolman chasing an armed chimp and his pretty handler. The other stories have high points, too: surfing and surf culture is lovingly described in "Sunset" and "Paradise," which skews a bit colonialist and features too many plot contrivances. The final piece, "The Last Ride," is a moving but clich�d story about a Texas border lawman who tries to do the right thing against all odds. Winslow's women are as tough as the men, and the author does a good job conveying the "dance of the sexes" but inhabits the men's heads better and more believably. VERDICT Fans of the author will eat up these neat, taut, action-packed stories, told in staccato sentences and one-line paragraphs. Newcomers to Winslow's world will hope to see more of Lubesnick--or almost any of the characters still standing after the stories end.--Liz French, Library Journal

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2020
After three epic-scale masterpieces?The Cartel (2015), The Force (2017), and The Border (2019)?Winslow returns with a delicious serving of small plates. Bookending several novellas that reunite fans with characters from previous Winslow novels are two hard-hitting tales that evoke the tragedy-soaked worlds of The Force and The Border. In "Broken," a group of New Orleans narcotics cops (like those in The Force), led by the notorious JImmy McNabb, sets out on a revenge mission that crosses the line into vigilante territory and leaves McNabb seriously broken but maybe "stronger in the broken places." In "The Last Ride," a border-patrol agent looks at one too many kids in cages and tries to return a 10-year-old girl to her mother in Mexico, igniting a heart-rending chase that calls to mind both Willy Vlautin's Lean on Pete (2010) and the 1962 film Lonely Are the Brave. The power of these two tales notwithstanding, Winslow's devotees may find themselves relishing even more the exquisitely entertaining nostalgia trips on offer in the middle stories, which bring back, among others, those irrepressible aging surfers from The Dawn Patrol (2008) and The Gentlemen's Hour (2011) as well as everybody's favorite marijuana growers, Ben, Chon, and O, from Savages (2010) and The Kings of Cool (2012). A greatest-hits album but with all-new melodies: what could be sweeter?!HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A new Winslow book will always attract a wide readership, and the prospect of a new FX TV series based on the author's Cartel trilogy will only heighten the demand.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)