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.

The trilogy tracks this relationship across decades, through war and prison, across continents. It begins, in The Power Of The Dog, in 1975, with DEA Agent Art Keller and a young Mexican man named Adán Barrera who will grow up to become the fictional head of the very real Sinaloa drug cartel. It has stakes that hang lives and nations in the balance. No looking away from the absolute horror of America's longest-running war - the war on drugs. The Border, like its predecessors, is a brutally grim book. There is a lot of internal monologuing done by good men in bad places. It feels, for long stretches, like watching a fantastically good 80's action movie - one of those made in the days before self-awareness and irony became marketable. The book is trope-heavy, stereotype-heavy, occasionally (okay, often) one-dimensional. 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. 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. Worse, the voice of someone faking the affectation (which Winslow is not).Īnd like all of Winslow's books, The Border is big. It's the voice of someone who's trying to make fun of bad tough-guy pulp - stringing together the least amount of words into a sentence, the least amount of sentences into a paragraph. The Border, like all of Winslow's books, is written in Winslow's voice, which is choppy, curt, atonal, ugly. I'm going to start with the second thing first. I have two things to say about The Border, the final book in Don Winslow's drug war trilogy. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Border Author Don Winslow

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