The Power of the Dog was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2005 after Winslow spent six years researching and writing it. The novel follows DEA agent Art Keller across three decades of the American drug war, from the early 1970s through the early 2000s. Keller begins as an idealistic agent embedded with Mexican narcos; he ends as a man whose pursuit of justice has cost him his marriage, his agency’s trust, and his moral clarity.
The scope is enormous: Winslow traces the rise of the Guadalajara cartel (the real-world organization that unified Mexican drug trafficking in the late 1970s), the murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in 1985 (a watershed event in the drug war), and the CIA’s documented involvement with drug traffickers who funded the Nicaraguan Contras. The characters — dozens of them, each fully realized — include cartel bosses, street dealers, corrupt politicians, Mafia figures, Irish-American mobsters, journalists, priests, and ordinary Mexicans whose lives are ground up by the machinery of trafficking and enforcement.
The novel’s moral argument is devastating: the drug war is not a conflict between good and evil but a system in which every participant — government agents, traffickers, politicians, bankers — is complicit, and in which the only people who suffer are those with no power. Keller’s pursuit of the cartel boss Adán Barrera mirrors the futility of the war itself: every victory produces a new enemy, every arrest opens a new market, and every escalation of enforcement produces an escalation of violence.
Collecting The Power of the Dog
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2005): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good/very good: $40–$100
- Signed: $150–$400