Ten top dirty cop novels

Adrian McKinty's books include the Detective Sean Duffy novels The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, In the Morning I'll Be Gone, Gun Street Girl, Rain Dogs and Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly, and the standalone historical The Sun Is God. The Cold Cold Ground won the Spinetingler Award. I Hear the Sirens in the Street won the Barry Award and was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award. In the Morning I'll Be Gone won the Ned Kelly Award and was selected by the American Library Association as one of the top-10 crime fiction novels of 2014. Gun Street Girl was shortlisted for the Anthony, Ned Kelly, and Edgar Awards.

In 2017 at CrimeReads he tagged his top ten dirty cop novels, including:

Don Winslow, The Force

What Wambaugh and Ellroy do for the LAPD Winslow does for the NYPD. There have been many great dirty New York cop novels but Winslow has really done something special here by embracing police corruption as the raison d’etre of an entire segment of the force. Detective Sergeant Dennis Malone leads the Manhattan North Special Task Force, an elite unit established to combat drug gangs, organized crime and gun running. Years of undercover work and dirty deals have compromised Malone and his cohorts so that by the beginning of the book they’re a well oiled thieving machine. Unfortunately for Malone the feds and Internal Affairs are looking for a sacrificial lamb to appease the punters and from then on the book is cop versus cop, cop versus DA, cop versus FBI—pretty much everything except cop versus criminals. A masterpiece of the genre.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue