One of the Best Books of the Year: A New York Times Critics' Pick, The Seattle Times, The Denver Post, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Amazon, National Post (Toronto), The Guardian, New Statesman, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times (London), The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday

The New York Times Winslow's drug war version of The Godfather . . . A big, sprawling, ultimately stunning crime tableau . . . A magnum opus . . . Don Winslow is to the Mexican drug wars what James Ellroy is to L.A. Noir. -Janet Maslin

Esquire An epic, gritty south-of-the-border Godfather for our time. You don't have to read Don Winslow's The Power of the Dog to get swept away by The Cartel, its ripped-from-the-headlines sequel, but you should. You should try to get your hands on everything Winslow's written, because he's one of the best thriller writers on the planet. -Benjamin Percy

NPR Hugely hypnotic new thriller . . . the pace and feel of an exploded documentary . . . a brilliant and informative work of fiction about a nightmare world that flourishes in the bright light of day. -Alan Cheuse

Rolling Stone A Game of Thrones of the Mexican drug wars, a multipart, intricately plotted, blood-soaked epic that tells the story of how America's unquenchable appetite for illegal drugs has brought chaos to our southern neighbors and darkened our own political and criminal culture. -Will Dana

Booklist (starred review) Winslow's riveting and tragic epic seamlessly blends fact and fiction to tell [an] incredible, heartbreaking story. . . . Winslow never loses control of his subject or his characters, despite the book's scope and complexity. There is some of The Godfather here, but Winslow's characterizations, though certainly multidimensional, have more of an edge to them than do Puzo's, a greater recognition of the tragedy a violent power struggle leaves in its wake. Clearly one of the most ambitious and most accomplished crime novels to appear in the last 15 years,The Cartel will likely retain that distinction even as the twenty-first century grinds on. -Bill Ott

Arizona Republic The Cartel is the most important crime saga of the millennium. This is reporting and expose built around an intricate plot, finely etched characters and whip-crack dialogue. . . . Storytelling that matters. -Robert Anglen

Lee Child Sensationally good, even after the near-perfection of The Power of the Dog. Less of a sequel than an integral part of a solid-gold whole.

Men's Journal Winslow is the most fearless chronicler of the chaos and violence along the U.S.-Mexico border . . . who has written what could be the War and Peace of the War on Drugs. -Erik Hedegaard

Fresh Air The Cartel tells its ghastly story with enjoyable verve yet I was even more impressed with the way Winslow uses his plot to offer a superb history of the cartels and those out to stop them. Steeped in reportage, the novel. . . possesses a virtue I associate with traditional documentaries: it explains things. I finished the book understanding why Juárez is so violent; why cartels murder so many innocent people; why both the American and Mexican governments favor some cartels over others; and why the war on drugs is not just futile, but morally compromised. It's here that fiction and documentary come together in a shared sense of, well, bleakness. -John Powers

Michael Connelly Don Winslow has done it again. The Cartel is a first rate edge-of-your-seat thriller for sure, but it also continues Winslow's incisive reporting on the dangers and intricacies of the world we live in. There is no higher mark for a storyteller than to both educate and entertain. With Winslow these aspects are entwined like strands of DNA. He's a master and this book proves it once again.

Los Angeles Times Winslow has delivered two of the most . . . emotionally resonant novels in the past decade, 2005's The Power of the Dog and its epic conclusion, The Cartel. . . . H