The author of 17 novels, including The Cartel 's 2005 prequel, The Power of the Dog, Winslow is a true-crime writer skilled at creating deep and compelling characters, He populates the novel with so many memorable secondary personalities that, initially, they’re hard to track. Overshadowing Keller and Barrera’s personal grudge, however, is a vast, powerful, dark-hearted, graphically violent, procedural tale of drug-traffic economics, shifting allegiances and betrayals, bribery and corruption, heartbreaking collateral damage, and an accelerating rampage of torture, killings and massacres that drive recklessly toward the novel’s final and unforgettable showdown. They chose different paths and now they’re bitter enemies sworn to kill each other, which they try to accomplish throughout the book. You see, in their younger years, Keller and Barrera were friends. His peaceful routine of tending beehives ends when he learns of Barrera’s escape. Drug Enforcement Agency superstar Art Keller, has found sanctuary from his years of obsessively fighting Mexico’s drug cartels.

The novel begins in a New Mexico desert monastery where its no-nonsense hero, U.S.

Within the first 70 of its 600-plus vivid pages, Adán Barrera, the fascinating, suave, drug-cartel patrón - loosely based on El Chapo - escapes from his country’s most secure prison to rebuild his Sinaloan drug-trafficking empire. Read this disturbing and, yes, addictive epic tale instead. Want to know why El Chapo probably won’t be captured anytime soon? Never mind the evening news.

Don Winslow’s new novel, The Cartel (***1/2 out of four), which fictionally chronicles the past decade of Mexico’s brutal drug-lord wars, echoes the stunning, headline-grabbing jail break from a maximum-security prison by Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman, the legendary, billionaire drug kingpin.

Winslow the cartel