Full disclosure: I’ve become obsessed recently with the border noir subgenre of crime fiction; this, as I grow ever older (that’s not a complaint) and harder to please (that’s not a complaint, either). I wasn’t very worried about liking Don Winslow’s drug-and-blood-soaked opus THE CARTEL, which is not so much a sequel to THE POWER OF THE DOG as a continuation of it. Given that it was published a decade ago, I felt duty-bound to circle back and read that awesome novel before digging into the follow-up. I’m glad I did, if only to report that the brilliant, violent magic of the previous book is continued, enhanced and increased in this one, almost as if it is one giant novel divided into two parts.

One problem with getting on in years: It becomes harder to keep track of characters or storylines within a novel. Thus it was a surprise for me that THE CARTEL, with its sprawling plotlines that radiate from and circle around and come back on themselves, and its hundred or so characters who are constantly double-crossing each other never once got me lost. I didn’t suddenly recover brain cells that I lost in the 1970s, either; this state of affairs is due entirely to Winslow, an amazing, almost deific literary talent who should be a household name and eclipses, well, just about everybody.

"...an unsanitized, unvarnished version of the ongoing drug wars occurring along the 2,000-mile border shared by the United States and Mexico. It is full of nasty vignettes that will make you wish you could pour bleach into your eyes to purge your memory of what you have read, even as you turn the pages for the next ones."

Along with its predecessor, THE CARTEL is the magnum opus of crime fiction. It concerns, as one might guess, a cartel --- specifically, a Mexican drug cartel. It jumps forward in time in leaps and bounds, and from character to character, each of whom is distinctive enough to be memorable (see above), but the main character is Art Keller, a woebegotten, emotionally damaged DEA agent who is involved in nothing more or less than a blood feud with a drug lord named Adán Barrera. The irony, introduced in THE POWER OF THE DOG and expanded upon here, is that Keller’s attempts to bring down Barrera, a former friend, are indirectly responsible for Barerra’s ascendency into power as one of Mexico’s greatest drug kingpins.

THE CARTEL occurs primarily in the mid-2000s. Some months have passed since the conclusion of THE POWER OF THE DOG, when Keller’s efforts finally resulted in Barrera being incarcerated, seemingly forever, in an American prison. However, as the new book begins, Barrera engineers a scheme that gets him transferred from his involuntary high-security incarceration into a Mexican prison. He rules during his relatively short stay there like the king he once was before his allies engineer an escape that was all but a foregone conclusion from the moment Barrera returned to Mexican soil. He professes to be uninterested in retaking his position at the top of the roost, but that is just what he sets out to do, while setting a bounty in excess of two million dollars on Keller, his nemesis.

Keller can’t live in a world where Barrera runs free. He devotes his energies to taking him down by any means necessary. His major problem, professionally, is that he cannot trust the Mexican government, from its courtrooms to its police officers; even his closest allies may be working against him. Keller finds that he must form some unexpected alliances, holy and otherwise, if he has any hope of capturing Barrera and extracting a rough but deserved justice from him, if such is possible. Even if that happens, it will not be easy, and Keller doesn’t have much, if any, of his soul left to sacrifice. Or at least so it seems.

THE CARTEL is an unsanitized, unvarnished version of the ongoing drug wars occurring along the 2,000-mile border shared by the United States and Mexico. It is full of nasty vignettes that will make you wish you could pour bleach into your eyes to purge your memory of what you have read, even as you turn the pages for the next ones. Winslow never stops introducing fascinating and memorable characters. At about the halfway mark, we meet an older, blind prostitute. I was screaming that I didn’t want to know her backstory; Winslow, of course, wasn’t listening, and it was worse than I had imagined. How did things get so bad? Winslow provides an answer; you may or may not agree with it (I strongly did not), but that doesn’t make this tale any less worth its magnificent, uncompromised telling, which illustrates the worst of the butterfly effect when applied to bullets and best intentions.

Set aside everything else and read THE CARTEL, along with THE POWER OF THE DOG. Then get ready for another volume. I have a feeling that Winslow is not done yet with the deadly dance between and among the characters left at the end of the book. If I’m right, hopefully we won’t have to wait another decade to read it.