The Border

September 1, 2018

Multi-award-winning Winslow wraps up a pounding trilogy begun with The Power of the Dog and The Cartel with longtime war-on-drugs combatant Art Keller having managed to defeat the Sinaloa Cartel godfather at a huge personal cost. Now he faces a bunch of dangerous new drug traffickers and an incoming administration secretly linked to them. With a 250,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2019
Winslow (The Cartel, 2015, etc.) wraps up his trilogy, 20 years in the making, on the war on drugs as it's played out on the U.S.-Mexico border.Art Keller is a man with enemies. Wherever he goes, he leaves a pile of bodies behind him--narcotraficantes, cops on the take, bad guys of every description. Sometimes he plies his trade in Guatemala, sometimes El Paso, sometimes D.C., wherever the white lines take him. But now--well, he's in trouble, at war "against his own DEA, the U.S. Senate, the Mexican drug cartels, even the president of the United States." Someone is irritated enough at him, in fact, that a sniper has been dispatched to shoot up the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where Keller is paying his respects. That's guaranteed to tick Keller off, and so he goes into battle in a changed scenario: The hit men and Zetas of old are shadows of their former selves while the new generation struts around, as one does, in "a black Saint Laurent jacket that has to go for at least three grand." When Keller notices such stuff, it means you're on his radar, which is not where you want to be. He recruits a few like-minded warriors, and off they go. Well, some of them, anyway: "If you want to be in the real war, fly back to Seattle, pack your things, and be here ready to work first thing Monday morning," he growls to a kid who wants to go zipping around in helicopters with a knife between his teeth instead of manning a desk. The bad guys begin to drop off in a tale that's part Tom Clancy, part didactic and ever-so-gritty how-it's-done asides ("The Americans teamed with the Mexican marines on raids that were basically executions") and part old-school shoot'em-up: "Keller takes the policeman's sidearm--a 9mm Glock--and moves through the trees toward the shooter."Jack Ryan's got nothing on Winslow's guy. An action-filled, sometimes even instructive look at the world of the narcos and their discontents.

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Starred review from February 25, 2019
In bestseller Winslow’s stunning conclusion to his monumental Cartel trilogy (after 2015’s The Cartel), Art Keller, now the head of the DEA, has spent decades waging a relentless campaign against the Mexican drug cartels. It’s now late 2012, and Adán Barrera, Keller’s longtime nemesis and the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, is missing and presumed dead. Violence soon escalates as the fractured remnants of Barrera’s organization struggle against a host of new players vying for control of the drug trade. The bottom has fallen out of the marijuana market, and heroin has once again become the drug of choice for a new generation of Americans hooked on opiate painkillers. When fentanyl, a lethal new synthetic opiate, hits the streets, not only are poor minority users dying but well-to-do white kids are overdosing in record numbers. Keller knows like nobody else that America’s “war on drugs” has been a complete failure, and he opts for a daring new clandestine approach: instead of targeting the suppliers in Mexico, he goes after the money in the States. With clear-eyed determination and an almost Shakespearean grasp of human nature, Winslow takes readers on an unforgettable journey. Agent: Shane Salerno, Story Factory.