Nate’s Reviews > The Cartel > Status Update

This shit has so much more to do with real people and events than Power of the Dog that I'm getting that thing in historical fiction where you know how certain characters end up/how certain stories play out, which usually sucks...but it also lessens the constant emotional nut-kicking this book delivers. The story about the dead Mexican Marine and his family...FUUUUUUUCK.

Guys...this book. This FUCKING book.

I can't stop obsessing over how much this book feels like one of those many stories from history or even fantasy where the Great Man creates an empire, then dies and it falls apart into chaos and conflict with new states springing forth in the tumult. Just gonna go ahead and say it: The Cartel is a modern-day version of the Diadochi wars, but with drugs and an obsessive foreign official adding to the melee.

Wooooooow....I just realized the word "quixotic" actually comes from Don Quixote. I'm dumb.

It doesn't really effect the actual content of the book, but whoever did the designs for this and the Power of the Dog's new paperback edition should win some kinda fancy award. This shit just screams "read me or I'll fuck you up!"

Even at its most convoluted and chaotic points, fucking A Song of Ice and Fire isn't as violent, confusing and filled with double-and-triple crossing as this book is.

"So Arturo "Killer" Keller (who has a literal 2 FUCKING MILLION DOLLAR BOUNTY ON HIS HEAD) just met and is falling for a beautiful, intelligent, morally and ethically admirable and politically involved woman in the middle of a psychotically violent Cartel war. I'm really happy for them, and I think it's actually gonna turn out great!"

-The Literal, For-Real, Dumbest Guy on Earth.

Gonna use a gun metaphor here because that seems like what Winslow would do: if Power of the Dog was a shotgun of a book, The Cartel is a goddamn M60.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w4Xu...

Okay, this is like the tenth time in these books that Adan has "screamed his orgasm." What the hell, man? It's ridiculous. He coldly orders the killings of men, women and children then the second he gets near a vagina he starts screeching like he's Robert Plant or some shit? Utterly bizarre.