It took 14 years, beginning with The Power of the Dog in 2005, but Don Winslow has finally finished his monumental trilogy about the Mexican drug cartels and, on the other side of the border, the American dealers, fixers and addicts who keep the trade flourishing. THE BORDER (Morrow/ HarperCollins, $28.99) is a mighty book, overflowing with dramatic subplots populated by characters who come and go and are killed off with alarming frequency. In one disturbing sequence, inspired by a real-life atrocity, 43 Mexican students are dragged from their tour buses and immolated. At the other end of this devastating spectrum, a college freshman on Staten Island gets hooked on heroin and prostitutes herself for a fix. A D. E. a. agent named Art Keller is both our guide through this world and an active player in its scenes of unflinching violence - as well as surprising tenderness. Since he emerged from an operation in the jungles of Guatemala in 2012, he has been obsessed with bringing down Adán Barrera, the ruthless fictional godfather Winslow has placed at the head of the real-life Sinaloa drug cartel. With its rival, the Zetas, wiped out, Sinaloa rules the trade. When Barrera falls, caravans of narcos make their way up twisted country roads to pay their respects at his funeral; then they fight to the death to succeed him. Winslow writes like someone who's been to hell and back and can't wait to talk about the experience. He especially wants to make the point, as one Mexican woman puts it, that her government (and, by implication, ours) is not serious about shutting down the drug trade, it's serious about managing the drug trade. Whether good, bad or altogether hopeless, his characters are full of life and hard to forget. Among the most lethal: Ruben Ascensión, called El Cachorro, the Puppy, and Belinda Vatos, adored as a narco rock star. Although Winslow's plot is epic-scaled and intended to raise serious issues about the drug trade as a major American industry, it's those multiple generations of crazy narco families that really make his case. Venetians love to gossip, Donna Leon advises us in unto us a son IS GIVEN (Atlantic Monthly, $26) , her latest mystery featuring that most compassionate of policemen, Guido Brunetti, commissario di polizia. There's bound to be talk when Gonzalo Rodriguez de Tejeda, the rich Spanish godfather of Brunetti's wife, Paola, adopts his lover and makes the young man his legal heir. To the degree that we love Gonzalo, we can be concerned for him, Paola says, but we cannot gossip about him, at least not at this table. To keep peace in the family, Brunetti agrees; but as a devotee of the classics he can't help thinking of Caesar's designated heir, his nephew Octavian, whose accursed lineage handed Rome to the likes of Tiberius, Caligula and Nero. Things turn ugly when Gonzalo unexpectedly dies on a visit to his family in Madrid, and uglier still when his best friend, who has traveled from Yorkshire to Venice for the funeral, is strangled at her hotel. Of course, Brunetti has seen crimes like this before, but this cop is neither jaded nor callous, and he has that rare quality Italians would call un cuore d'oro, a heart of gold. Comic crime capers are fun. Comic crime capers starring women are even more fun. William Boyle delivers some choice laughs and a terrific trio of felons in A FRIEND IS A GIFT YOU GIVE YOURSELF (Pegasus Crime, $25.95) . This jaunty escapade begins in Brooklyn when Rena Ruggiero, the 60-year-old widow of a departed wiseguy, slugs Enzio, her 80-year-old neighbor, for putting the moves on her. Thinking she's killed him, Rena jumps into Enzio's spiffy '62 Chevy Impala and heads for her daughter Adrienne's house in the Bronx. For good reason, Adrienne can't go on the lam, but her 15-year-old daughter, Lucia, thinks grandma is cool. With the addition of an ex-porn star, Lacey Wolfstein, the Chevy is full of adventurous females and good to go on a road trip that's so much fun you don't want it to end. GREG ILES'S books often take place in beleaguered small towns in Mississippi like Bienville, the fictional setting of CEMETERY ROAD (Morrow/HarperCollins, $28.99) . Faithful to formula, his stock characters face unlikely predicaments that are resolved through familiar plot devices. Here it's the murder of an archaeologist who unearths historical artifacts that pose a serious threat to a projected paper mill. But there's something about Bienville that rings true, something about the plight of small towns all over the South struggling to remain relevant in a modern economy. In fiction, if not in life, all they need is a hometown hero like Marshall McEwan to revive them. I'm a good Southern boy at heart, Marshall says, explaining why he has returned to care for his aged father and rescue both the family newspaper and the town itself. The story may be corny, but there's a terrific party scene set in a grand old hotel that luxuriates in one last night of glory. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

After the remarkable trifecta of Iles' magnificent, perhaps career-defining Natchez Burning trilogy, readers couldn't help but speculate about what the author would do next. After three thick novels, would he go with something shorter, sleeker, less freighted with dramatic import? Nope. His new book, coming in at more than 750 pages is another big one, but as with the Natchez Burning novels it contains not an ounce of fat. The story starts simply: in Bienville, Mississippi, a man is murdered. Marshall McEwan, a journalist who was closer to the murdered man than he is to his own father, vows to expose the killer, but to do that, he must go up against the most powerful men in Bienville, who are part of a conspiracy that goes much deeper than McEwan could possibly have imagined. Iles sits alongside the icons at the top of today's crime-fiction mountain. He has made Mississippi his own in the same way that James Lee Burke has claimed Cajun country and Michael Connelly has remapped contemporary Los Angeles. Readers who have been eagerly awaiting his first post-Natchez novel needn't have worried; they will be talking about this one for a quite a while.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Another big, intense tale from a heavy-hitter.--David Pitt Copyright 2010 Booklist

Bad things are astir on the banks of the Big Muddy, hallmark territory for homeboy Iles (Mississippi Blood, 2017, etc.)."Buck's passing seems a natural place to begin this story, because that's the way these things generally start." Yep. This particular bit of mischief starts when a Scoutmaster, surrogate father, and all-around good guy gets his head bashed in and his body dumped into the Mississippi. And why? That's the tangled tale that Iles weaves in this overlong but engaging yarn. Thanks to the back-room dealing of a bunch called the Poker Club, the little river-bluff city of Bienville has brought a Chinese paper pulp mill to town and, with it, a new interstate connection and a billion dollarswhich, a perp growls, is a billion dollars "in Mississippi. That's like ten billion in the real world." But stalwart journalist Marshall McEwanthat's McEwan, not McLuhanis on the case, back in town after attaining fame in the big city, to which he'd escaped from the shadow of his journalist hero father, now a moribund alcoholic but with plenty of fire left. Marshall's old pals and neighbors have been up to no good; the most powerful of them are in the club, including an old girlfriend named Jet, who is quick to unveil her tucked-away parts to Marshall and whose love affairs in the small town are the makings of a positively Faulknerian epic. Iles' story is more workaday than all that and often by the numbers: The bad guys are really bad, the molls inviting ("she steals her kiss, a quick, urgent probing of the tongue that makes clear she wants more"), the politicians spectacularly corrupt, the cluelessly cuckoldedwell, clueless and cuckolded, though not without resources for revenge. As Marshall teases out the story of murder most foul, other bodies litter the stagefortunately not his, which, the club members make it plain, is very much an option. In the end, everyone gets just deserts, though with a few postmodernly ironic twists.Formulaic but fun. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Marshall McEwan, the star of this compulsively readable thriller from bestseller Iles (Mississippi Blood), returns to his hometown of Bienville, Miss., for two good reasons: his father's getting old and rickety, and the woman he loves still lives there. McEwan, who spent years as a top-flight investigative journalist in Washington, D.C., takes the helm of his family's failing 150-year-old newspaper, The Watchman, and is soon immersed in the biggest news in town: the impending arrival of a Chinese-financed paper mill that will supposedly get Bienville back on its feet. Meanwhile, rumors of corruption, back-dealing, and murder swirl around the project and won't go away. Lurking in the background is the Poker Club, a cabal of businessmen who have run the town from behind the scenes since the Civil War. And the slinky Jet Matheson, the love of McEwan's youth, keeps putting off divorcing her husband, Poker Club heir-in-waiting Paul Matheson, though she's perfectly willing to see McEwan on the side. Iles once again delivers a sweeping tale of family dysfunction, sexually charged secrets, and the power of wealth, with an overlay of violence and Southern sensibility. Despite the novel's length, it all goes by in a flash. Author tour. Agents: Dan Conaway and Simon Lipskar, Writers House. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.