Review by New York Times Review
THE AMERICAN BORDER with Mexico isn't much of one. Every morning, at towns in Texas like Brownsville and McAllen, fleets of 18- wheelers packed with cheap consumer goods - some of them illicit - rumble over international bridges, slowing down only to shiftgears. Every evening, waves of immigrants stream north, moving toward Los Angeles and Phoenix - echoed, in a sense, by the waves of tourists streaming south, moving toward Cancún and Acapulco. Presidential dreams of a big, beautiful wall notwithstanding, for now - and, perhaps, for the foreseeable future - an endless mass of inexpensive T-shirts, fresh avocadoes, black tar heroin, undocumented migrants and fanny-packed vacationers will continue flowing undiminished through the great, swirling circulatory system that the two countries share. There is, however, at least one group for whom the border is a hard frontier, solid and impermeable: the American lawenforcement officers who have the job of investigating crimes that occur along its length. In the opening pages of "Bloodlines," Melissa del Bosque's fast-paced true-crime tale about a Mexican drug cartel and the Texas cops who chase it, Scott Lawson, a newly minted F.B.I. agent stationed in Laredo, sits in his car in a parking lot within earshot of the border, listening to the crackle-pop of automatic gunfire drifting from Nuevo Laredo, its sister city across the Rio Grande. "How could two cities, so much alike," he thinks, "have six murders a year in one, and three hundred in the other?" Lawson, a Tennessee native who has just arrived in Texas, is frustrated by his inability to reach across the river and slap his cuffs on the narcotraffickers responsible for the violence. His American gaze at Mexico is mournful - like that of a man watching his cousin die of cancer. "Bloodlines" is the story of Lawson's big shot at dismantling a drug cartel: in this case, the Zetas, a brutal crew of Mexican commandos who, around the turn of the millennium, crossed their own sort of border and switched from working as the government's elite counternarcotics force to using their military training to run cocaine themselves - and wreak bloody havoc on their rivals. In the early 2000s, the Zetas were renowned, del Bosque writes, for being "a multibillion-dollar, transnational business just like General Motors." But they were even better known for their baroque displays of violence. When the Zetas' leaders discover that a few of their subordinates in the border town of Piedras Negras have betrayed them, they send assassins, or sicarios, to kill not only the traitors and their families, but hundreds of other people - among them, their neighbors, relatives, even their gardeners and pets. What saves "Bloodlines" from devolving into the gratuitous gore that fills the pages of Mexico's blood-soaked tabloid media - the so-called Red Notes, or notas rojas - is the unique, binational crime that Lawson is investigating: a colorful money-laundering operation in which Miguel Treviño, a top Zetas chieftain, is funneling millions of dollars in illicit profits north across the border to be cleansed through the purchase of what are ultimately 400 pedigreed race horses in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. Treviño's main partner in the scheme is his brother, José, a onetime bricklayer who, at least initially, is living in obscurity outside Dallas. But as the Zetas' dirty money flows toward him through a series of straw men and corporate fronts, José - with Agent Lawson on his tail - is quickly swept away into the rollicking and hayscented world of western quarter-horse racing. An investigative reporter who has covered the border for publications like Time and The Guardian for nearly two decades, del Bosque based her account on scores of personal interviews and reams of court documents, and proves herself fluent in detailing the exceedingly different, but equally rich, milieus of cartel kingpins, Texas equestrians and federal investigators. Even though it seems at times that she is stretching her reporting and indulging in a bit of narrative license, she tends to get the details right: Her drug lords, immune to concerns of prosecution, give their horses conspicuously carefree names like Break Out the Bullets and Cartel Syndicate; her Mexican-American hot walkers, the lowly track employees who cool down stallions after runs, refer to the Zetas in frightened whispers as "the last letter," or la ultima letra; and Lawson, a rookie agent, complains in the way of cops everywhere about his government-issue vehicle, a run-down gold Chevrolet Impala. While "Bloodlines" may not have the poetic heftof similarly situated classics like Charles Bowden's "Down by the River," which explores the flow of drugs and death at the border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, it does provide a penetrating glimpse of borderland culture set within the context of a briskly moving police procedural. The investigation into José Treviño's connections to the Zetas follows the path of many criminal inquiries: It starts out slowly with tantalizing tips from the American owner of a farm in Texas where Treviño boards his horses; builds in momentum with the discovery of an informant from within the Zetas' organization; is briefly derailed by the inevitable interagency law enforcement squabbles (and by the appearance of an interloping New York Times reporter), before it is resolved - no spoilers here - in court. Along the way, del Bosque has the great good fortune to have at her disposal an array of unusual and interesting characters. Lawson, her protagonist, is not your typical fed: The son of a Tennessee beat cop, he was raised riding horses and dreams of owning a ranch back home even as he struggles with his case - and learning Spanish - in Laredo. His partner, Alma Perez, is just as freshly drawn: She is a Mexican- American woman with family on the south side of the border who gets pregnant in the middle of the hunt for the Treviños, but stays on for the takedown nonetheless. But the work's most vivid and engaging character is the border itself, which emerges in the minds of Lawson and Perez as a kind of appalling one-way obstacle - not, that is, as Mr. Trump's defensive barrier protecting the American homeland against foreign hordes and imported violence, but rather as a tragic hindrance that prevents the agents from getting at the source of the disturbance. The bloodlines of the title belong, at least nominally, to the wellsired race horses that the Zetas own through their patsy, José Treviño. But, steeped in fury and soaked in murder, the border is, of course, a bloodline too. At one point in the story, Lawson and Perez stand together in the parking lot of a grocery store on a bluffabove the border, across which - only moments earlier - one of their Mexican targets had escaped. The scene spread out in front of them is, despite its loveliness, nefarious and threatening. "Lawson got out of the car and walked to the fence," del Bosque writes, "staring at the tall fronds of the Carrizo cane that lined the slow-moving river down below. The waning twilight, the distant sound of Spanish pop music from one of the houses on the bluff, and the dark swallows skimming over the river made him feel like he was in a dream suddenly gone sour." It was, del Bosque adds, "like standing next to a black hole. And there was nothing they could do about it." Lawson's American gaze at Mexico is mournful - like that of a man watching his cousin die of cancer. ALAN FEUER covers crime, criminal justice and political extremist groups for The New York Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 16, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Del Bosque, a National Magazine Award-winning investigative reporter for the Texas Observer, chronicles the FBI's discovery of a Mexican cartel's elaborate scheme to launder money through the U.S. purchase and racing of quarter horses. By 2010, the Zetas had brutally warred with rivals and one-time allies, killing countless civilians and emerging as one of Mexico's most powerful drug cartels. FBI rookie Scott Lawson is biding a hardship post in the Texas border town of Laredo when he begins investigating the auspicious entry into quarter-horse racing by Dallas mason José Treviño brother of high-ranking Zetas Miguel and Omar. With the cooperation of a Texas ranch owner working with José, Lawson and his team learn that Miguel is using his above-the-law brother, various straw buyers, and outright cheating to clean drug money in this industry already known for handshake deals, cheating, and doping. Del Bosque breaks up the complex tale into brief, fluidly narrated, suspenseful chapters. Fully portraying the many key players and following the intricacies of the Treviños' sophisticated plan, the FBI's race against other federal agencies and the press to crack it, the gut-dropping dynamics of cartel coercion and retribution, and the eventual, dramatic trial, del Bosque recounts a true story that reads like crime fiction.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
The perennial problem of operating a drug cartel is how to launder millions of illegal dollars. Miguel and Omar Treviño, the leaders of Mexico's bloodthirsty Zeta cartel, dabbled in quarter horse racing, using proxies to buy, sell, and race hundreds of horses. This worked until rookie FBI agent Scott Lawson got a tip that led him to Tyler Graham, an American stable owner who was willing to help Lawson infiltrate the cartel. Thus began a years-long investigation by Lawson and partner Alma Perez to unravel the complex strands of the conspiracy before the Treviños got wind of it and vanished-and before any of their witnesses could be murdered. Investigative journalist del Bosque combines interviews with her extensive knowledge of the region to craft a compelling story of how the government followed the links in the chain that finally led to four successful convictions. Not much about horses or racing but an intense look at the criminals behind the events. VERDICT The minutia of a money-laundering case can be difficult for the layman to follow, but the author makes the hunt entertaining. Those interested in the drug trade, the racing industry, and the region will enjoy.-Deirdre Bray Root, MidPointe Lib. Syst., OH © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Two FBI agents work to take down members of a drug cartel wrapped up with quarter horse racing in Texas.In her first book, Texas Observer investigative reporter del Bosque follows new agent Scott Lawson and his eventual partner, identified here with a pseudonym because she has family in Mexico, as they work with Tyler Graham, the young owner of a horse farm, to uncover a money laundering scheme set into motion by the Zetas, a violent cartel controlled by the Trevio family. The author describes scenes of action in suspenseful detail without neglecting the more mundane aspects of the investigation, including the painstaking tracing of the money trail between the cartel's leaders in Mexico and their agents, who often spend unusual amounts of cash to buy horses in the United States. The author has a clear understanding of the often counterproductive conflicts among the various government agencies working the drug war in Texas, and she builds tension in the narrative by emphasizing how close the FBI's carefully built case came to being scuttled by the agendas of other agencies. Del Bosque also follows closely the trial of those accused of money laundering, analyzing the ups and downs of the prosecution of the case. While the account is, as might be expected, skewed toward the points of view of those participants who were willing to talk with her, particularly Lawson, the author skillfully uses a variety of sources to convey the intricacies of a complicated case and builds in bits of background without slowing down the movement of the story. The working relationship between Lawson and his partner is particularly well-defined. Fans of true crime and readers curious about the inner workings of Mexican drug cartels should enjoy this well-researched story. Though different in execution, this book pairs nicely with Joe Tone's Bones, which covers the same subject. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
