The Power of the Dog

The law acts as a shield for the innocent, and the criminal is the sword threatening them.

But Don Winslow's The Power of the Dog from 2005 and James Ellroy's L.A.

Confidential from 1990, they take that comforting boundary, and they just obliterate it.

Completely smash it to pieces.

They force the reader to confront a much more terrifying reality, like what happens when the primary enemy isn't a single bad actor but the entire system itself?

Yeah, and I am still trying to wrap my head around the sheer scale of The Power of the Dog.

I mean, Winslow does not give you a neat little contained murder mystery in a locked room.

Oh, definitely not.