The Power of the Dog (Power of the Dog, #1)

by Don Winslow

Art’s father was a San Diego businessman who seduced a Mexican girl while on vacation in Mazatlán. (Art often thought it was funny that he was conceived, albeit not born, in Sinaloa.) Art Senior decided to do the right thing and marry the girl—not too painful an option, as she was a raving beauty; Art gets his good looks from his mother’s side. His father brings her back to the States, only to decide that she’s like a lot of things you get in Mexico on vacation—she looked a lot better on a moonlit beach in Mazatlán than in the cold, Anglo light of the American day-to-day. Art Senior dumped her when Art was about a year old. She didn’t want to throw away the one advantage her son had in life—U.S. citizenship—so she moved in with some distant relations in Barrio Logan.

He was fucked from jump street. The local Mexicans weren’t going to talk to him because as a Yanqui in Culiacán he could only be one of two things—a drug dealer or a narc. He wasn’t a drug dealer because he wasn’t buying anything (Taylor wouldn’t free up any money; he didn’t want Art fucking up anything they already had going), so he had to be a narc. The Culiacán police wouldn’t have anything to do with him because he was a Yanqui narc who should stay home and mind his own business, and besides, most of them were on Don Pedro Áviles’s payroll anyway.