REVIEW

The Final Score
by Don Winslow
HarperCollins Publishers, 2025

He told us after City in Ruins that he would not be writing any more. We mourned the news, begged him not to quit, but eventually accepted his decision.  My reading of him was reduced to his political posts on X, where he has not held back in attacking the current administration in a defense of democracy. Then the big surprise last fall: a new book was on the way. I preordered immediately and eagerly awaited its arrival.

The Final Score consists of six long stories, which have variously been called both novelettes and novellas. The first hints at something light, the latter would indicate a longer work; long short stories —from 13,000 to 15,000 words, I would guess—seems the best description as the narrative in a short story is condensed, usually only focusing on a single incident and a few characters at most, and that is what we have.

The title story focuses on the “final score” of a legendary robber, facing life in prison. The target:  a multimillion-dollar casino, fortified to the max. As with any Winslow, you’re gripped from page one. No way to put it down. You’ll read it walking to the supermarket, while shopping in the supermarket, while eating lunch, while taking a shower (it can be done) —there is no stopping. So it’s a mercy that we can come up for air between stories. The familiar terse prose pulls you along:

It’s a solemn promise between them – if something happens to one, the other will take care of his family.
Six big scores together.
Seven years in Q together.
They’re like brothers.
More than brothers.
They go over and over it.

I will say no more except that this is the best heist story you will ever read. 

“The Sunday List” refers to the blue laws that prevent some states from opening liquor stores on Sunday. Here we follow a high school boy out to make a few bucks by picking up a list of names from the liquor store owner and delivering the liquor of choice to the customers' homes. Another knock-out of a story; while “The North Wing” tests the limits of an honest patrolman who would very much like to prevent his ne’er-do-well cousin from doing hard time in gen pop. It begins: “The night Chrissy Pritchett kills Sarah Gaines isn’t that much different from a lot of other nights.”

“True Story” is pure dialogue between two wise guys, in classic Winslow style:
            _True story. You know Lenny, right?
_Lenny the Barber or Lenny No Socks?
_Lenny No Socks.
_You’re kidding? I’ve known him since he wore socks.
_So anyway, Lenny gets this job, a house construction out on the shore, two-point-two-million dollars.
_Nice.
_Right? Guy from New York —
_Of course.
The utterance, the cadence, everything is pitch perfect.

“The Lunch Break” follows surfer/PI Boone Daniels and his crew who have been hired to babysit a spoiled rotten, drug addicted young movie star. The interaction gives us another banger of a story.

Lastly, “Collision,” the longest story of all, what could properly be called a novella, shows how an instant decision to avenge an insult to his wife can land an upstanding businessman in the hell of a prison.

The crowding, the noise, the anxiety, the fear, the confinement, the tedium, the violence, the hopelessness—prison produces both mass and individual psychosis.
It makes a human inhuman.
This is the world that Brad McAlister enters.
He’s been designated a level 4 prisoner.
They put him in with the most violent.

The setting may be stereotypical, but the story surprises at every turn.

If you like crime, you already know Don Winslow. And if crime is not your genre of choice, but you love a “good story,” the kind you will long remember, this collection is the place to jump in.  The syncopated rhythm of the prose, with the fragmented structure and deliberate pacing shifts, is mesmerizing; the characters (perhaps with the exception of the wise guys) often defy type; and the plots are bursting with creative imagination. 

Welcome back, Don, and may you never stop writing.
J.A.