The Cartel

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars | 18,703 ratings

Price: 20.44

Last update: 01-07-2025


About this item

From the internationally best-selling author of the acclaimed novel The Power of the Dog comes The Cartel, a gripping, ripped-from-the-headlines story of power, corruption, revenge, and justice spanning the past decade of the Mexican-American drug wars.

It's 2004. DEA agent Art Keller has been fighting the war on drugs for 30 years in a blood feud against Adán Barrera, the head of El Federación, the world's most powerful cartel, and the man who brutally murdered Keller's partner. Finally putting Barrera away cost Keller dearly - the woman he loves, the beliefs he cherishes, the life he wants to lead.

Then Barrera gets out, determined to rebuild the empire that Keller shattered. Unwilling to live in a world with Barrera in it, Keller goes on a 10-year odyssey to take him down. His obsession with justice - or is it revenge? - becomes a ruthless struggle that stretches from the cities, mountains, and deserts of Mexico to Washington's corridors of power to the streets of Berlin and Barcelona.

Keller fights his personal battle against the devastated backdrop of Mexico's drug war, a conflict of unprecedented scale and viciousness, as cartels vie for power and he comes to the final reckoning with Barrera - and himself - that he always knew must happen.

The Cartel is a true-to-life story of honor and sacrifice as one man tries to face down the devil without losing his soul. It is the story of the war on drugs and the men - and women - who wage it.


Top reviews from the United States

  • Scott Hedegard
    5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning and terrifying look into the world of the most lethal drug cartels
    Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2017
    Seldom do we see books that are technically fiction but based in hard reality and accurate historical details that match the brilliance of Don Winslow. I strongly encourage readers to read "The Power of the Dog" first, as it is the first half of a horrifying world of the Mexican drug cartels, their internal struggles, the jaw droppingly horrifying atrocities against anybody who dares cross a drug lord's path, or a cartel's.
    "The Cartel" is the second part of this monumental series, and because the first part is highly suggested as the first one to read, although "The Cartel" stands on its own, I will not get into too many plot details. The primary character, Art Keller, who has many notches on his own belt due to fighting in Vietnam and battles in the "War on Drugs", is a marked man having crossed every drug kingpin of note in Mexico and their paid lackeys like federal troops, corrupt politicians and police forces on all levels, not to mention the extremely violent paramilitary troops who enforce the wishes of the leaders of the notorious Zetas, a cartel that has absolutely no code of honor whatsoever. Whereas the other main character, the head of the Sinoloan cartel, the very crafty and intelligent Adan Barrera, at least gives the impression of leaving innocents alone, the Zetas kill anybody any time, including little street level junkies who are found guilty of buying their dope from Barerra's cartel instead of them, and vice versa.
    We can remember the horrible wars that racked Cuidad Juarez, the border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, where murders were being committed by the scores of victims, many mutilated and tortured and then dismembered and left on city streets as "lessons" for whatever infraction the cartels thought up on any given day. Winslow reports that in this phase of the internecine fighting, as many as close to 16000 Juarez citizens were gruesomely murdered in the space of just a couple of years. While that calamity has subsided somewhat, the worst border crimes focusing in Nuevo Laredo and Laredo, TX, where access to I-35, San Antonio, I-10 with its paths to Houston, New Orleans and beyond to Jacksonville, Florida is a temptation they can't ignore. Border agents, DEA agents and others are corrupted and many times because they want to live another day, so as we all know, the "war" on drugs is nothing but a lot of hot air, token busts, and was never designed to stop anything. There is simply far too much money to be made, and the U.S.' appetite for cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana is gargantuan. We as the consumers of these substances are just as culpable if we do use illicit drugs as the cartels, as they are only too happy to make tons of money and have huge international influence on whole governments while they're at it.
    The book itself is so well written and researched that it truly belongs in the pantheon of the greatest crime novels or historical crime books, like "The Godfather" for the thrilling story and suspense, and "Wiseguys" and "Casino" for accuracy and explaining just how vicious and just plain psycho cartel bosses and their underlings can be. That the Mexican government is up to its eyeballs in the drug trade is not news, but one can't help but maybe feel a bit of empathy for some in said government and law enforcement who are paid to play, or brutally murdered, and oftentimes forced to watch their families die first. It isn't much of a choice.
    Nonetheless, Winslow is a superb author, the two books gripping, and I can't wait to read his other novels. Be forewarned: "The Power of the Dog" and "The Cartel" are upsetting, depressing and disturbing. It's a story that needs to be told, however, and we must understand that as long as there is a demand for any kind of product or services, regardless of how dangerous or sinister, there will be a supply. It's a frustrating cycle that humanity bestowed upon itself.
  • Beyond The Realms
    4.0 out of 5 stars There is no such things as good guys in this story
    Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2015
    Rating: 4.5/5

    THE CARTEL is dark, it's gritty, it's sexually explicit and it's unrelenting in brutal violence as it peals back the flesh on the harsh realities of the failed war on drugs.

    There is no such things as good guys in this story, only bad guys and even worse bad guys. Everyone is corrupt, everyone has a rotted soul and very, very few get out of this world alive.

    While not quite up to the level of excellence of its predecessor (THE POWER OF THE DOG), THE CARTEL is still one of the better new books I have read this year. Just like the first book, this one is very broad, dense, with a worldwide sprawl in its depiction of the war on drugs, with Mexico being the primary source of action.

    While this book will keep you guessing and never fails to pull off surprise after surprise, I almost felt like it was too over reaching at times and went maybe a hundred pages too long. I felt like the whole subplot with Pablo and the reporters was unnecessary. Sure, the newspapers play a key part in the story, but I didn't feel like it needed to be as lengthy as a subplot with them, as what we got.

    Still though, this book is awesome! I highly recommend it if you want a book that feels completely real and authentic to real world happenings in the war on drugs. It's not pretty but it's a damn interesting read.
  • Richard B. Schwartz
    5.0 out of 5 stars Epic, Romance, Tragic Realism: A Masterpiece of Crime Fiction
    Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2015
    This is a very important novel. As I read it I was impressed by its simultaneous complexity and accessibility. It is journalistic in its immediacy and it reads like literal history subtly shaped and enhanced by a novelist’s narrative devices. It is so clear and so straightforward that one can easily overlook the literary models from which Don Winslow is drawing and the themes which he is exploring in a profound but unobtrusive way.

    If we take the classic division of literature into epic/lyric/dramatic, the novel is usually placed under the first category. While all novels are not ‘epic’ or epics, this one most certainly is. Epics often concern the establishment of a society, but this novel (like its predecessor, The Power of the Dog) depicts a society’s destruction and near dissolution. That is, in fact, one of The Cartel’s overarching themes: how complete is the destruction wrought by drugs, particularly drugs that are increasingly more powerful and less expensive? Is there any discernible room for hope? Art Keller, the protagonist of each of the novels, has a Mexican girlfriend. She says, in a pivotal line, that the difference between Mexicans and North Americans is that the latter believe that problems can actually be solved.

    Since the victories in this war are temporary and the core evils of addiction and greed are never fully conquered, Winslow is also tapping into the ethos and plot structures of the chivalric romance. This romance, however, does not occur in a single forest of wizards and necromancers; it covers the globe.

    Finally, the novel’s focus on a set of memorable individuals personalizes the many-sided story and takes us into the world of what James Ellroy calls ‘tragic realism’, a world in which redemption may be possible but one in which that redemption is very heavily compromised.

    So Don Winslow’s aspirations here are high. The canvas is huge, taking us from Guatemala to Barcelona, but the principal focus is Mexico (all of Mexico, from Juárez to Chiapas, from Sinaloa to the Gulf, from the remote safe houses to the fashionable condos of the city and coast). Art Keller, the DEA agent who has been fighting the cartels and its patrón, Adán Barrera, for thirty years, are joined by scores of other characters from a host of cartels (and their splinter sects) to a handful of good people, exhibiting courage in the face of overwhelming odds and uncommon cruelty. Some of these characters are menacing and violent to an unprecedented degree; none of them are dull. As the wars (cartel vs. cartel; the governments [and a few brave individuals] vs. the cartels) continue over the course of 600+ pages, several realizations set in.

    First (as in No Country for Old Men), the money involved is so great that it effects a breakdown in both human behavior and civil society. It is simply irresistible and it is pursued at vast costs, no matter what the consequences might entail. When you can buy a kilo of cocaine for $5,000 and sell it on the European market for $55,000, the temptations make those of Satan or Mephistopheles look like a waiter offering a spoonful of fruit loops to a diabetic.

    Second, as the violence and desperation escalate, our government ‘agent’ comes to realize that he has now become nothing more than a hunter. On the larger scale, the interactions, actions and reactions, of the governments, the drug traffickers and the agencies of law enforcement create a web of dependency that dissolves the sharp distinctions between good and evil. Ultimately (with governments choosing the lesser of evils among the cartels and with the exportation of drugs as the central element of Mexico’s economy), ‘the cartel’ is everyone, not just a single group of traffickers. Thus, the title, which seems somewhat innocuous, is in fact profound. It describes our very world itself.

    The novel has been ‘anxiously contemplated’, as Conrad would say. The architecture of the plot is dazzling. We cover ten years of time, hundreds of thousands of square miles of landscape, dozens and dozens of named, important characters and we do so clearly and straightforwardly because of Don Winslow’s guiding hand.

    I would offer particular praise for the novel’s texture, which is primarily achieved through the use of Spanish expressions, idioms and maxims, and yet the reader can follow this without having any knowledge of Spanish beyond the expressions which commonly occur in crime fiction. Winslow has clearly immersed himself in the language, culture, and history of contemporary Mexico and offered us a hard-earned result that is delivered with a very light touch.

    The Cartel is now the reigning novel treating modern drug trafficking, Winslow’s finest work (in tandem with The Power of the Dog) and a novel/epic/romance/realistic tragedy that no reader of crime fiction should miss.

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