Personal Battles in a Global War

When I started the book I had made some assumptions about what this book was going to say, who the characters were, where it was going. The first of the main characters shown I thought was going to be a Jack Reacher/Jack Ryan/Alex Cross protagonist, an impossibly competent and perfectly crafted self insert hero purpose built to feed the ego of the reader and plausibly survive anything Don Winslow could come up with. The Power of the Dog, however, quickly disabused me of my assumptions and never missed an opportunity to engage. 

If this book was written in the last 2010s, I would have assumed it was intended to be optioned for a miniseries on a streaming platform and Winslow settled on being published as a novel. Closer to an epic this book weaves a fascinating and detailed world set against the war on Drugs featuring a determined and righteous DEA Agent, pious and humble Padre, charming and intelligent Escort, deadly Hitman and deadlier Drug Kingpin who is equal parts along for the ride and in charge. Once I finished this book, I knew I enjoyed it but as time went on couldn't stop thinking about it. I kept ruminating, turning the characters, the themes, the narratives over and over again. And the more I think the more I have to admit I genuinely loved it. This book wouldn't leave me and so far, this is THE best book I have read in 2024. I decided to reread the part that stuck with me and there I found my answer: realism. Winslow does a great job with the details of the land (the Southwestern United States, Northern Mexico), the motivations of the characters (Revenge, ambitions, aimlessness, redemption) and building the world without bogging down the reader in needlessly purple prose. 

You understand how the war doesn't so much grow bigger, but the motivations become more personal. Characters take part in and commit acts violence and horrors worthy of damnation, but their actions make sense each step of the way. You might hate what they did but everyone had a damn good reason for doing it. And after all the violence these men and women didn't impact the global War on Drugs, as much as they played a small part in it motivated by personal conflicts. And that was the most realistic part of the novel.