Winslow peppers his novel with only very slightly fictionalized versions of real-life atrocities, so much so, that even readers who otherwise praise the book report being “often sickened and brought to tears by the violence and horrific scenes of murder and torture.” Many characters are brutalized before being killed in almost unimaginable ways, as they find themselves churned through a plot that “depicts people with a complete lack of humanity and compassion” but only because “this is based on the facts of what people have suffered.” The novel opens in 2004, and the anti-hero of the series, DEA super-agent Art Keller has had enough of the life that caused him to lose the woman he loved. The novel spans the years 2004-2014, which in real life saw some eighty thousand people killed as a result of this vicious, ongoing, and seemingly unsolvable conflict. Don Winslow’s 2015 thriller The Cartel is the second novel in the series Power of the Dog, a plot-driven, extremely violent, meticulously researched take on the last ten years of the Mexican-American drug war.
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