The Decatur Daily

Bobby Braddock, the only living songwriter to have written number-one country songs in five consecutive decades, celebrates standout lines in more than eighty country masterpieces. Unique stories give the reader a behind-the-scenes look at classics from Hank Williams, Bill Anderson, Roger Miller and Merle Haggard, as well as twenty-first-century icons like Alan Jackson, Taylor Swift and Eric Church. Artist Carmen Beecher brings these tales to vivid life with strikingly realistic illustrations of seldom-seen songwriters, easily recognizable superstars and unforgettable song characters. From late 1940s jukebox hits to present-day chart toppers, Braddock and Beecher offer a magical journey from the songwriter's pen to the singer's lips to the listener's ear.

From Don Winslow (“A writer so good you almost want to keep him to yourself”—Ian Rankin), an electrifying new novel of love and revenge, politics and influence, corruption and honor. Moving at breakneck speed, it tells a riveting, sometimes harrowing story set in the shifting nexus of power among the Latin American drug cartels, the American mob, and the U.S. government. Spanning the years from the rise of the Mexican drug Federación in the 1970s to the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s to the vicious drug wars of the 1990s, the action ranges from Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen and the halls of Washington to the streets of Tijuana and the deserts of the American Southwest. The players: a DEA agent, a drug lord, a call girl, a hit man, a priest. Caught up in the war on drugs, willingly or not, each is trying to escape the sins of the past while negotiating the treacherous currents of the present. Their seemingly disparate lives—taking shape on one side of the law or the other, or straddling both—slowly converge as they struggle to overcome, in any way possible, the “power of the dog.” From the jungles of Latin America to the vicious netherworld of the California–Mexico border, this is the war on drugs you haven’t seen—its devastations and deliriums, its alliances and betrayals, its pawns and kings. A masterpiece of epic storytelling, The Power of the Dog is Don Winslow at the very top of his form.