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Narcos Books
Showing 1-50 of 138
El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency (Hardcover)
by (shelved 10 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.07 — 5,025 ratings — published 2011
The Cartel (Power of the Dog, #2)
by (shelved 9 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.36 — 38,335 ratings — published 2015
Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw (Paperback)
by (shelved 5 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.98 — 19,298 ratings — published 2001
The Power of the Dog (Power of the Dog, #1)
by (shelved 5 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.37 — 47,572 ratings — published 2005
At the Devil's Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel (Hardcover)
by (shelved 5 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.31 — 1,670 ratings — published 2011
Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America (Hardcover)
by (shelved 4 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.14 — 1,460 ratings — published 2016
Los señores del narco (Paperback)
by (shelved 4 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.04 — 2,078 ratings — published 2010
The Last Narco: Inside the Hunt for El Chapo, the World's Most Wanted Drug Lord (Hardcover)
by (shelved 4 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.73 — 1,132 ratings — published 2010
Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.87 — 1,357 ratings — published 2019
Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.22 — 638 ratings — published
Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.14 — 11,400 ratings — published 2016
Desperados: Latin Druglords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can't Win (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.21 — 111 ratings — published 1988
Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.87 — 67 ratings — published
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.23 — 31,902 ratings — published 2015
Pablo Escobar: My Father (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.87 — 4,728 ratings — published 2014
The Infiltrator: My Secret Life Inside the Dirty Banks Behind Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.90 — 1,417 ratings — published 2009
Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (Hardcover)
by (shelved 3 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.72 — 1,506 ratings — published 2010
El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World's Most Infamous Drug Lord (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.88 — 330 ratings — published 2021
A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing Forty-Three Students (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.98 — 744 ratings — published 2016
Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent into Darkness (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.78 — 1,750 ratings — published 2013
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.31 — 2,480 ratings — published 2010
American Dirt (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.36 — 671,090 ratings — published 2020
A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the "Mexican Drug War" (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.78 — 586 ratings — published 2015
The Border (Power of the Dog, #3)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.47 — 18,798 ratings — published 2019
The Queen of the South (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.95 — 15,740 ratings — published 2002
Hunting El Chapo: The Inside Story of the American Lawman Who Captured the World's Most Wanted Drug-Lord (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.85 — 1,567 ratings — published 2018
Drug Lord: A True Story: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 4.06 — 462 ratings — published 1990
Escobar: The Inside Story Of Pablo Escobar, The World's Most Powerful Criminal (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.81 — 1,349 ratings — published 2009
The Sound of Things Falling (Hardcover)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.84 — 21,066 ratings — published 2011
To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.95 — 401 ratings — published 2011
God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre (Paperback)
by (shelved 2 times as narcos)
avg rating 3.99 — 2,704 ratings — published 2008
Rinsed: From Cartels to Crypto How the Tech Industry Washes Money for the World's Deadliest Crooks (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 4.02 — 537 ratings — published
On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 4.03 — 3,009 ratings — published 2019
BLOW: How a Small-Town Boy Made $100 Million with the Medellin Cocaine Cartel and Lost It All (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 4.02 — 2,603 ratings — published 1993
El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 3.60 — 1,039 ratings — published 2011
Parásitos perfectos (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 4.38 — 181 ratings — published 2021
Tierra contrafuturo (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 3.90 — 130 ratings — published 2021
Cocaine: White Gold Rush in Peru (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 3.55 — 11 ratings — published 1989
The Devil Takes You Home (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 3.66 — 12,917 ratings — published 2022
Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 3.75 — 12 ratings — published 2009
Gangsters of Harlem (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 3.50 — 44 ratings — published 2007
Snowfields: The War on Cocaine in the Andes (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 4.00 — 1 rating — published 1992
Lo demás es silencio (Andanzas) (Spanish Edition)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 4.09 — 140 ratings — published
Hielo Negro (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 3.79 — 337 ratings — published 2011
Albanian Mafia Wars: The Rise of Europe's Deadliest Narcos (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 3.88 — 113 ratings — published
The Corporation: An Epic Story of the Cuban American Underworld (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 4.16 — 787 ratings — published 2018
City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai (Hardcover)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 3.59 — 1,067 ratings — published 2018
Smuggler's End: The Life and Death of Barry Seal (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 3.37 — 52 ratings — published
Gangs of Jamaica: The Babylonian Wars (Jamaica Insula)
by (shelved 1 time as narcos)
avg rating 4.00 — 17 ratings — published 2013
“It is psychotic and hateful behavior. But such behaviour is typical in many war zones. Cartel thugs have gone beyond the pale because they are completely immersed in a violent conflict, living like soldiers in the trenches. Imagine the life of Zetas thugs in the war-torn northeast of Mexico, fighting daily with soldiers and rival gangs, moving from safe house to safe house, completely divorced from the reality of normal citizens. In these ghastly conditions they commit atrocities that the world finds so hard to comprehend. For many of these cartel soldiers on the front line, war and insurgency have become their central mission. While thugs have traditionally talked about fighting over drug smuggling, now many are talking about smuggling drugs to finance their war.”
― El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
― El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
“The award-winning American TV series Breaking Bad has a scene in its second season set in the murder capital of Ciudad Juárez. In this episode, American and Mexican agents are lured to a patch of desert just south of the border looking for an informant. They discover the informant’s head has been cut off and stuck on the body of a giant turtle. But as they approach, the severed cranium, turned into an IED, explodes, killing agents. The episode was released in 2009. I thought it was unrealistic, a bit fantastic. Until July 15, 2010.
In the real Ciudad Juárez on that day, gangsters kidnapped a man, dressed him in a police uniform, shot him, and dumped him bleeding on a downtown street. A cameraman filmed what happened after federal police and paramedics got close. The video shows medics bent over the dumped man, checking for vital signs. Suddenly a bang rings out, and the image shakes vigorously as the cameraman runs for his life. Gangsters had used a cell phone to detonate twenty-two pounds of explosives packed into a nearby car. A minute later, the camera turns back around to reveal the burning car pouring smoke over screaming victims. A medic lies on the ground, covered in blood but still moving, a stunned look on his face. Panicked officers are scared to go near him. The medic dies minutes later along with a federal agent and a civilian.
I’m not suggesting that Breaking Bad inspired the murders. TV shows don’t kill people. Car bombs kill people. The point of the story is that the Mexican Drug War is saturated with stranger-than-fiction violence. Mexican writer Alejandro Almazán suffered from a similar dilemma. As he was writing his novel Among Dogs, he envisioned a scene in which thugs decapitate a man and stick a hound’s head on his corpse. It seemed pretty out there. But then in real life some gangsters did exactly that, only with a pig’s head. It is just hard to compete with the sanguine criminal imagination. Cartel thugs have put a severed head in a cooler and delivered it to a newspaper; they have dressed up a murdered policeman in a comedy sombrero and carved a smile on his cheeks; and they have even sewn a human face onto a soccer ball.”
― El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
In the real Ciudad Juárez on that day, gangsters kidnapped a man, dressed him in a police uniform, shot him, and dumped him bleeding on a downtown street. A cameraman filmed what happened after federal police and paramedics got close. The video shows medics bent over the dumped man, checking for vital signs. Suddenly a bang rings out, and the image shakes vigorously as the cameraman runs for his life. Gangsters had used a cell phone to detonate twenty-two pounds of explosives packed into a nearby car. A minute later, the camera turns back around to reveal the burning car pouring smoke over screaming victims. A medic lies on the ground, covered in blood but still moving, a stunned look on his face. Panicked officers are scared to go near him. The medic dies minutes later along with a federal agent and a civilian.
I’m not suggesting that Breaking Bad inspired the murders. TV shows don’t kill people. Car bombs kill people. The point of the story is that the Mexican Drug War is saturated with stranger-than-fiction violence. Mexican writer Alejandro Almazán suffered from a similar dilemma. As he was writing his novel Among Dogs, he envisioned a scene in which thugs decapitate a man and stick a hound’s head on his corpse. It seemed pretty out there. But then in real life some gangsters did exactly that, only with a pig’s head. It is just hard to compete with the sanguine criminal imagination. Cartel thugs have put a severed head in a cooler and delivered it to a newspaper; they have dressed up a murdered policeman in a comedy sombrero and carved a smile on his cheeks; and they have even sewn a human face onto a soccer ball.”
― El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency
