Keller comes out of retirement once again to go after Barrera in the meantime, a new drug power is rising in Mexico-the even more brutal, nihilistic, and senselessly violent Zetas. While he was gone, El Federación’s alliances have collapsed into an all-out war between the various groups, so he has to build his Sonoran cartel all over again. Barrera is extradited to Mexico where he, like Guzman, promptly escapes and gets back to business. Nevertheless, this imprisonment doesn’t last.
When The Cartel begins, Keller has quit the DEA and is instead tending bees at a monastery in order to have some peace.
However, at the end of the previous novel, Power of the Dog, Keller seemed to have finally won by putting Barerra behind bars. Besides his professional stake in shutting Barrera’s operation down, Keller has a personal vendetta as well: Barrera savagely executed Keller’s partner. For the past thirty years, he has been pursuing a blood feud against Adán Barrera, the head of El Federación, an alliance between the most powerful narcotics cartels in the world-and loosely based on real-life crime lord Joaquin Guzman, the former head of the Sinaloan cartel. Winslow peppers his novel with only very slightly fictionalized versions of real-life atrocities, so much so, that even readers who otherwise praise the book report being “often sickened and brought to tears by the violence and horrific scenes of murder and torture.” Many characters are brutalized before being killed in almost unimaginable ways, as they find themselves churned through a plot that “depicts people with a complete lack of humanity and compassion” but only because “this is based on the facts of what people have suffered.” The novel opens in 2004, and the anti-hero of the series, DEA super-agent Art Keller has had enough of the life that caused him to lose the woman he loved. The novel spans the years 2004-2014, which in real life saw some eighty thousand people killed as a result of this vicious, ongoing, and seemingly unsolvable conflict.
Don Winslow’s 2015 thriller The Cartel is the second novel in the series Power of the Dog, a plot-driven, extremely violent, meticulously researched take on the last ten years of the Mexican-American drug war.
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