The Cartel was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015, a decade after The Power of the Dog. The novel covers the period from 2004 to 2014, corresponding to the most violent decade in the Mexican drug war — the period in which the Calderón government’s military offensive against the cartels produced not peace but a fragmentation of the drug trade into warring factions whose competition for territory generated over 100,000 deaths.
Art Keller, now retired and teaching at a New England college, is drawn back into the war when Adán Barrera — the cartel boss he spent decades pursuing — escapes from a Mexican prison and rebuilds his empire. The narrative expands outward from Keller and Barrera to encompass the full ecology of the drug war: journalists murdered for reporting on cartel activity; migrants who use drug trafficking routes to cross the border; young men recruited into enforcer squads with a life expectancy measured in months; politicians who take cartel money because the alternative is death; and American consumers whose demand for drugs fuels the entire system.
Winslow researched the novel obsessively, spending years in Mexico interviewing sources on both sides of the conflict, and the detail shows: the novel reads like a documentary that has been given the emotional depth of fiction. The set pieces — the massacre at Dos Erres, the ambush on a highway, the slow assassination of a journalist — are based on real events, and their power derives from the reader’s knowledge that these things actually happened.
Collecting The Cartel
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2015): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$80
- Very good/very good: $10–$30
- Signed: $50–$150