I don’t think as a reader you can be left in any doubt about Winslow’s politics regarding drugs, the border and Trump after reading this rather large book. It takes us through the world of drugs and cartels in Mexico and America’s role in the ‘war on drugs’.

The war is brutal, people are killed one by one, sometimes forty nine innocents at a time all for what? An increase in the amount of drugs being shipped across the border? What Winslow argues for in this book is that America looks at itself and asks why so many people in one of the richest countries on the earth needs so many drugs.

We have to ask ourselves – what kind of corruption is there of our collective national soul that makes us the world’s greatest consumer of illicit drugs? We can say that the roots of the heroin epidemic are in Mexican soil, but opiates are always a response to pain. What is the pain in the heart of American society that sends us searching for a drug to lessen it?

Is it poverty? Injustice? Isolation?

I don’t have the answers, but we must ask ourselves the real question –

Why?

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This book is the third in a series that took 20 years to write and what an ending.

There is a lot to take in with this book; a cast of hundreds in the wars of the cartels, the planning, the machievellan scheming to take over and be number one, the children both involved and uninvolved but still dragged in, the prisons and the corruption at every level in both Mexico and America and no one wins.