The Cartel

Starred review from April 27, 2015
Set in 2004, Winslow’s masterly sequel to The Power of the Dog (2005) continues his epic story of the Mexican drug wars. DEA agent Art Keller has withdrawn from the world, tending bees for a New Mexico monastery, when he receives word that his old nemesis, Adán Barrera, leader of the Sinaloan cartel El Federación, has escaped from prison and is intent on reestablishing control of his empire. Keller agrees to return to duty and spearheads several attempts to capture Barrera, who remains elusive and seemingly protected by the Mexican police and government. As a war between Barrera’s cartel and several different competing factions ensues, violence overwhelms the city of Ciudad Juárez. Along the way, Keller falls in love with Marisol Cisneros, a beautiful doctor who heads a small but committed group of journalists and artists dedicated to resisting the violence. This exhaustively researched novel elucidates not just the situation in Mexico but the consequences of our own disastrous 40-year “war on drugs.” Author tour; 50,000–copy first printing. Agent: Shane Salerno, Story Factory.

May 15, 2015
A Mexican drug lord heads into a final showdown with the obsessed American Drug Enforcement Administration agent who has been dogging him for years in this vast and ambitious thriller from Winslow (The Kings of Cool, 2012, etc.). Winslow has envisioned his novel on an epic scale, evident not just in the length, almost 600 pages, but in the grave tone. Various chapters bear epigraphs from Hemingway, Shakespeare, and the Bible. At heart, this is the familiar tale of symbiosis between pursuer and pursued, reconfigured for the war on drugs and given a mean noir edge. The opponents are the Mexican narcotics kingpin Adan Barrera, who manages to escape from prison and resume control of his business, and Art Keller, the DEA agent who, exhausted and his marriage kaput, retreated in the years following his capture of Barrera to the silence of a monastery. Winslow, whose crime novels set in the surfing world (like The Dawn Patrol) had a casual ease, seems to have written each word of this very long book in granite. Sadly, that seriousness has provided mostly cliches on the order of "he was born on Christmas Day to campesinos in Apan, where life promised little opportunity except to make pulque or go into the rodeo" or "the son of an Anglo father who didn't want a half-Mexican kid, he always had one foot in each world, but never both feet in either." Like its hero, this novel hovers between two styles-pulp fiction and literary seriousness-which, taken together, render the genre formulas leaden.

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Starred review from May 1, 2015
It's been 10 years since the publication of Winslow's The Power of the Dog, which featured DEA agent Art Keller leading the charge against the Mexican cartels in the never-ending War on Drugs. After having put his onetime friend and eventual cartel king, Adan Barrera, in prison and killing his two brothers, Keller left the agency and took up tending bees in a monastery. But, in 2004, Barrera arranges his transfer to a Mexican prison, which leads quickly to his escape, and the war between competing cartels is ignited all over again. Reluctantly but inevitably, Keller joins the fight once more and, for the next eight years, working undercover in Mexico, directs the effort to find and kill Barrera. Winslow's riveting and tragic epic seamlessly blends fact and fiction to tell the incredible, heartbreaking story of those blood-drenched years (in 2010 alone, there were 15,723 drug-war-related deaths in Mexico). Jumping from detailed but never less than compelling discussion of the logistics behind the cartel's operation to the story of the people involved, Winslow draws the reader in with rich portraits of not only Keller and Barrera but also other cartel figures, DEA agents, and Mexican drug fighters, journalists, and innocent victims. The main subplot, concerning a group of journalists in Juarez and their seemingly hopeless attempt to cover the cartel's atrocities without becoming victims themselves, is really a novel within a novel, but remarkably, Winslow never loses control of his subject or his characters, despite the book's scope and complexity. There is some of The Godfather here, but Winslow's characterizations, though certainly multidimensional, have more of an edge to them than do Puzo's, a greater recognition of the tragedy a violent power struggle leaves in its wake. Clearly one of the most ambitious and most accomplished crime novels to appear in the last 15 years, The Cartel will likely retain that distinction even as the twenty-first century grinds on.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 1, 2015

In this unsparing follow-up to his highly regarded The Power of the Dog, Winslow resumes his fictionalized account of the catastrophic Mexican-American drug war, now in its fourth decade. The novel begins in 2004, with kingpin Adan Barerra in prison and the man who captured him, rogue DEA agent Art Keller, keeping bees in a monastery, with a price on his head. Soon Barrera engineers an escape, forcing Keller back on the hunt and setting off a nightmarish chain reaction of Godfather-esque machinations, retaliations, and unholy alliances that are often hard to follow. Writing in his customary rat-a-tat prose style, Winslow expands the story to encompass dozens of peripheral characters, including a beauty queen-turned-drug empress, a 13-year-old prodigy killing for God, and a heroically dedicated band of journalists tasked with documenting the endless carnage. With most of law enforcement on some cartel's payroll and the rapidly dwindling newspapermen intimidated into silence, the cartels have nearly free rein to settle their gruesome turf wars and continue profiting from the endless U.S. demand for narcotics as once-proud Mexican cities fall into ruin. VERDICT The staggering body count will be a challenge for many readers to get past, but the payoffs for those who persevere are immense. Winslow's two-novel project about this still-raging conflict is entertaining, well researched, and difficult to process, a jarring glimpse into a reality about which many Americans remain blissfully unaware. [See Prepub Alert, 12/15/14.]--Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2015

Finally, a follow-up to 2005's The Power of the Dog, a bone-shaking novel about the drug trade that's being made into a movie. Here, DEA agent Art Keller has retired to a monastery after putting away leading drug lord Adan Barrera. Then Barrera arranges to serve the rest of his term in a Mexican prison.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2015

In this unsparing follow-up to his highly regarded The Power of the Dog, Winslow resumes his fictionalized account of the catastrophic Mexican-American drug war, now in its fourth decade. The novel begins in 2004, with kingpin Adan Barerra in prison and the man who captured him, rogue DEA agent Art Keller, keeping bees in a monastery, with a price on his head. Soon Barrera engineers an escape, forcing Keller back on the hunt and setting off a nightmarish chain reaction of Godfather-esque machinations, retaliations, and unholy alliances that are often hard to follow. Writing in his customary rat-a-tat prose style, Winslow expands the story to encompass dozens of peripheral characters, including a beauty queen-turned-drug empress, a 13-year-old prodigy killing for God, and a heroically dedicated band of journalists tasked with documenting the endless carnage. With most of law enforcement on some cartel's payroll and the rapidly dwindling newspapermen intimidated into silence, the cartels have nearly free rein to settle their gruesome turf wars and continue profiting from the endless U.S. demand for narcotics as once-proud Mexican cities fall into ruin. VERDICT The staggering body count will be a challenge for many readers to get past, but the payoffs for those who persevere are immense. Winslow's two-novel project about this still-raging conflict is entertaining, well researched, and difficult to process, a jarring glimpse into a reality about which many Americans remain blissfully unaware. [See Prepub Alert, 12/15/14.]--Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.