THE LAST WORD
MIRIAM R. KRAMER
The Border by Don Winslow
T
his review originally was published in April 2019. I also highly recommend Dopesick, a compulsively watchable fictionalized short series and exposé starring Michael Keaton. It illuminates the recent heroin epidemic that has infected the United States. Dopesick is not a Don Winslow production, but it provides an excellent recent companion to this trilogy in examining the origin of dangerous, overprescribed opiates, and subsequently the effects of their cheaper substitute, heroin, on the American public. Despite weighing in at a walloping 716 pages, Don Winslow’s The Border 12
March 2022
explodes off the mark like a doped-up Olympic sprinter. The final installment in a trilogy covering the United States’ War on Drugs, The Border picks up where The Cartel and The Power of the Dog leave off and brings the story to an electric conclusion. Winslow’s twenty years of research into the illegal drug trade between the United States and Mexico make him uniquely qualified as a novelist to bring its dizzying highs and lows to light. Art “Arturo” Keller, the American son of a Mexican mother and an absentee American father, is a former CIA agent turned DEA after Vietnam. Having spent more of his career living in Mexico than the United States, Art has seen everything from the burning of Mexican poppy fields in the mid1970s to the vicious battles between
cartels seeking to mark territory in the early 2010s in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Obsessed with bringing down Sinaloa cartel leader Adán Barrera, who murdered his partner, Ernie Hidalgo, Keller uses almost any resource possible, even other cartels, to find a way to destroy his bête noire. In The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, Winslow brings to life complex interactions between drug cartels; Mexican armed forces, police, and security agencies; ordinary and upper-class Mexicans; and Mexican journalists. In The Border, Winslow continues the gritty stories of his mesmerizing characters while turning his attention more towards the United States’ role. After staggering out of a firefight
involving Adán Barrera and a competing cartel at the beginning of The Border, Keller has been tapped to become the head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, placing him in the position to take his decadeslong worm’s-eye view of the drug war and apply it from the top down in Washington, DC’s bureaucratic snake pits. Heroin’s popularity in the United States has soared in the 2010s as it and its synthetic cousin, fentanyl, become an affordable substitution for the prescription painkillers liberally dispensed by doctors throughout the country. While fighting its ascendance, Keller comes across information that will culminate in a constitutional crisis LAST WORD > PAGE 13
Old Town Crier
