If your trust in the U.S. government has already been waning of late...then reading Don Winslow's newest tour de force, The Power of the Dog, is likely to put the torch to whatever particle of faith you still possess ... The Power of the Dog is the best crime novel about the Western Hemisphere's drug trade I have read in many years. It will leave you stunned, but also sickened by the dark side of American democracy. Dog is relentless in the pounding it delivers to U.S. policy regarding the so-called War on Drugs (which is really tantamount to a non-war on drugs) ... The book's greatness doesn't derive solely from its astute dissection of governmental deception. This tale is elevated as well by Winslow's cast of evocative characters ... Author Winslow has been thorough in his research, both for historical and plotting-strategy purposes ... Winslow has written a maelstrom of a fictional political and historical book, eternally complicated, filled with killers and lovers, passion, betrayal and the quest for redemption. A book like The Power of the Dog rarely comes along, and when it does, let it break your heart and open your mind.
...[a] sober epic ... The Power of the Dog...seem[s] like the work of...a guy with salt-and-pepper temples and an off-the-rack suit, hovering over his bourbon on the next barstool. He’s telling you everything you did and didn’t want to know about what went on and still goes on south of the border in the feeding of North America’s insatiable appetite for pot, heroin, cocaine, and meth. You can’t be sure how much of it is true; Narcolandia is ballad country, a realm of legend and rumor. But none of it is a laughing matter. Scratch that. Some of The Power of the Dog is funny. Winslow can do a comic mid-level Italian gangster as well as most guys. But that novel was written before the slaughter and chaos of the cartel wars reached hallucinatory proportions.
This latest offering by P.I. Winslow...is an epic tale of the drug culture that harkens back to the 1970s ... Writing in a get-to-the-point, no-nonsense style, Winslow skillfully introduces an astonishingly large cast of characters in an intricate web of plot lines and insider details. This true nail biter will surely captivate readers until the very last page.
Winslow...once again offers a crime novel with breakneck pacing, a sardonic worldview, and a teeming cast of superheated characters ... Winslow feverishly indicts the U.S. war on drugs, tracing flawed policies that have cost DEA agents their lives yet failed to stop the flow of drugs across the border. Intricate plotting and manic energy power this page-turner.
The war on drugs is powerfully dramatized in Winslow's ambitious, dense and gritty latest ... Winslow's depth of research and unflagging attention to detail give the story both heft and immediacy, and his staccato, present-tense prose shifts easily among wildly disparate settings and multiple points of view. A complex plot, well-drawn characters and plenty of double-crossing make this a thinking person's narco-thriller.
A sprawling, old-fashioned saga ... you’ll need a scorecard to keep track of the quick and the dead. Winslow’s most ambitious yet, though its irony and pathos work better in individual episodes than across the whole broad historical canvas.
