The Border was published by William Morrow in 2019, completing the trilogy that began with The Power of the Dog. Art Keller has been appointed head of the DEA — the drug czar — and discovers that winning the war on drugs from Washington is even more impossible than fighting it in the field. The cartels have diversified: they are no longer just drug organizations but multinational conglomerates with investments in real estate, banking, and politics. Their money flows through American financial institutions, their lobbyists work the halls of Congress, and their interests are protected by the same political class that claims to be fighting them.
Winslow’s fictional parallels to the Trump era are deliberate and unmistakable: the novel features a real estate mogul running for president with campaign funding linked to cartel money, a border wall proposed as a solution to a problem that the wall cannot solve, and a political culture in which the appearance of toughness on drugs substitutes for actual engagement with the causes of trafficking. The novel does not name Trump, but the parallels are so precise that they constitute a form of political commentary disguised as fiction.
The trilogy’s cumulative argument is that the war on drugs is not a policy failure but a structural feature of the American economy — that too many powerful people profit from the drug trade (bankers, politicians, real estate developers, private prison operators) for the war to ever be won, and that the only people who want it won are the ones with no power to end it.
Collecting The Border
First edition (William Morrow, New York, 2019): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15
- Signed: $30–$80