Don Winslow Cartel Books In Order

[Merja Caryk]

Winslowwas born on October 31, 1953, in New York City.[3] He grew up in Perryville, a beach town near the village of Matunuck, Rhode Island.[4][5][6] He credits his parents for preparing him to become a writer: his mother was a librarian and his father was a non-commissioned officer in the United States Navy who told stories and invited Navy friends around who told more. They inspired Winslow to become a storyteller himself.[5] He majored in African history at the University of Nebraska.[3] While in college, he traveled to southern Africa, sparking a lifelong involvement with that continent.

While traveling between Asia, Africa, Europe and America, Winslow wrote his first novel, A Cool Breeze on the Underground, which was nominated for an Edgar Award and a Shamus Award for Best First Novel.[8] With a wife and young son, Winslow went back to investigative work, mostly in California, where he and his family lived in hotels for almost three years as he worked cases and became a trial consultant.

For his next novel, Winslow broke from the Neal Carey character to write the standalone Isle of Joy, about an ex-CIA agent who is pulled back into the world of espionage, this time as the target of his former agency and the FBI.

A film and publishing deal for his novel The Death and Life of Bobby Z, also a Barry Award finalist, for Best Novel, allowed Winslow to become a full-time writer and settle in his beloved California, the setting for many of his books.[9]

In 2010, Winslow published Savages, which was voted a top-10 book of the year by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Chicago Sun Times, and author Stephen King, and was a Barry, Dilys, and Steel Dagger Award finalist.[8] The rights were quickly scooped up by award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone. Winslow and Shane Salerno adapted the screenplay, and the film went on to star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Taylor Kitsch, Blake Lively, Benicio del Toro, Salma Hayek, and John Travolta.[12]

2012 also saw Winslow given the prestigious Raymond Chandler Award, Italy's top lifetime achievement honor for masters of the thriller and noir literary genre. Past recipients have included Stephen King, John Le Carr, John Grisham, and Elmore Leonard.

In 2019, Winslow published the third and final installment of his epic Cartel Trilogy, The Border. Critics raved about the conclusion to the sprawling saga and it was named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New York Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Irish Times, Booklist, and many others. The film rights to the trilogy had originally been purchased by 20th Century Fox but in 2019, due to the sprawling nature of the story and world therein, FX Networks acquired the rights from their sister studio to turn the novels into a TV series. Filming on the pilot is set to begin in late-2022.[15]

Winslow's next novel, City on Fire, is the first book in a planned trilogy about the feuding Moretti and Murphy crime families in Providence, Rhode Island, in the 1980s and 1990s.[16][17] The novel received critical acclaim and its screen rights were acquired by Sony to be adapted into a television series.[18]

During the 2020 presidential election, Winslow became politically active online, using his own money to champion liberal causes and criticize Donald Trump and his agenda. Winslow and Shane Salerno began creating political videos critical of the Trump administration for social media. On October 13, 2020, Don Winslow Films released a video critical of Trump prior to his campaign event in Pennsylvania. The video features Bruce Springsteen's song "Streets of Philadelphia" and has been viewed almost 10 million times. As of January 4, 2021, Winslow's videos had garnered over 135 million views.[20] As of April 2022, the total view count was over 250 million.[21]

A libel lawsuit was filed against Winslow on the basis of comments Winslow made in 2020 about an Irwin County Detention Center contractor, who Winslow had claimed performed illegal hysterectomies purportedly done at the direction of Donald Trump. In 2022 a district court ruled that the libel claims could go forward.[22]

Winslow said he writes from 5:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. and then hikes six or seven miles before returning to work. He typically works on two books at a time, moving to the other when work on the first stalls. He said the longest he has gone without writing after a book is completed was five days. He has described writing as "an addiction".[3][6][23]

The time it takes him to write a book varies. The Death and Life of Bobby Z was written on the train between Dana Point, California and Los Angeles, one chapter per trip.[3][5] The Power of the Dog took six years to research and write, including a trip to Mexico to interview people with similar experiences as the book's characters.[24]

Winslow's career as an investigator often took him to California to look into arson cases, as his storytelling skills helped explain cases to juries. In the mid-1990s, he moved to California with his wife, Jean, and their infant son, Thomas, and continued writing. They currently split their time between Julian, California,[3][6] and Rhode Island.

And like all of Winslow's books, The Border is big. Doorstopper-big. It has a thousand characters, many of whom are dredged up from previous installments The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, and some of whom count as spoilers just by the mention of their names. The story doesn't so much bounce between POV characters as it grows through them like a chart showing the growth of a rampaging infection.

Everything I know about 11th century Scottish politics I learned from Macbeth. Most of what I know about the Wars of the Roses comes from the Henrys and Richard III. These plays, they present a simplified, dramatized, bloody, glossy, terrible, wonderful, moving vision of a history that was very real and present to fans of Billy Shakespeare's epic soap operas in the 1600's. Don Winslow's trilogy does the exact same thing for the war on drugs.

It is operatic. It is visceral. It has stakes that hang lives and nations in the balance. It begins, in The Power Of The Dog, in 1975, with DEA Agent Art Keller and a young Mexican man named Adn Barrera who will grow up to become the fictional head of the very real Sinaloa drug cartel. The trilogy tracks this relationship across decades, through war and prison, across continents. The Cartel ends in the jungles of Guatemala, in a huge battle which sees dozens of characters wiped out and Art Keller walking alone out of the smoke. A survivor whose war is finally done.

300 years from now, when our children's children's children want to understand the defining conflict of the late 20th and early 21st century ... there's a fair chance that this is what they will read.

Keller takes a job as the head of the DEA. Rises to become the leading general in the war that has been his life since 1975. And the story shifts from Mexico to the border, to New York and Washington D.C., tracking (as is one of Winslow's remarkable strengths) the totality of the drug war and the places where it touches politics, immigration, real estate, Wall Street and the opioid epidemic.

Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, video games, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.

Note: Looking for a Hero: Staff Sergeant Joe Ronnie Hooper and the Vietnam War was co-authored by Peter Maslowski. Isle of Joy was also published as A Winter Spy using the pen name MacDonald Lloyd.

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Don Winslow's recently released novel The Cartel, a sequel to his 2005 book The Power of the Dog, chronicles the rivalry between a United States DEA agent and the cartel kingpin he is dead-set on taking down. In 600 pages, Winslow examines how the massive profits of drug trafficking allow for high-level corruption, explores the United States's role in the brutal violence plaguing Mexico, and questions the efficacy of a war against cartels determined to defend their power and prosperity by any means necessary.

The book is as gruesome a read as it is insightful, chock-full of research into the organization and tactics of cartels and their (at times) strikingly similar governmental opponents. It is disturbing, and it is based in large part on actual events. VICE spoke with Winslow about what inspired his work on the topic, and why he hopes it will bring attention to what he calls the "American problem" plaguing Mexico.

Now that was 1998, and we think that was a horrible incident, but it pales in comparison to what went on ten years later. The worst things I wrote about in Power of the Dog wouldn't have made the papers in 2011.

The cartels also got very sophisticated about communication. They figured out it wasn't enough to win a war on the ground, that they also needed to control the narrative. Their use of propaganda, particularly through social media, was something we had never seen before. It used to be criminals tried to hide what they did, but in this era of Mexico they proclaimed it as a means of intimidation and terrorism, but also recruitment.

How did you conduct research into the real-life and yet "nightmarish" events on which you based the book?

I read a lot of journalism. I talked to people again and again. In this surreal sense, I followed it on the net. You can pull these videos up in five seconds. But what I really tried to do was to put names to the victims. I just felt that I owed them that, so I would cross-reference materials to try to show that these people had lives and families and hopes and fears and dreams like everybody else, and not just to have them be pornography of violence.

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