Don Winslow Cartel Trilogy

[Terry Chavarin]

Andlike 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.

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