Marca de sangre. Los años de la delincuencia organizada. (Mark of Blood

Twenty-five years of wretched excess are deftly chronicled by de Mauleón in this fast-moving book recounting landmark episodes of Mexico's drug trafficking history since 1985, the year that the killing of DEA agent Kiki Camarena catapulted the narcos' gruesome exploits from the tabloids to the front pages. De Mauleón, a Mexico City journalist and fiction writer who has covered this beat for a decade, pieces together events from news archives, interviews, affidavits, and other documents to create a neck-snapping succession of stories that traces the lineage of the current kingpins and the positively Shakespearean succession of shady alliances, betrayals, deceptions, and murders by the thousands that have shaped the narco landscape. Names and nicknames by now familiar throughout the Americas are here: the exploits of the Beltrán and the Arrellano Félix clans; the amazing Amado Carrillo ("The Lord of the Skies"); the flamboyance of the legendary "Barbie," Edgar Valdez Villareal; and the macabre character of the "Pozolero" of Tijuana, whose peculiar role it was to dissolve the corpses of hundreds of cartel murder victims in acid. Perhaps most shocking, though, is the steady and convincing case that de Mauleón makes in repeatedly implicating officials at every level of law enforcement, government, and the military as accessories to the work of the cartels. Readers will be unlikely to celebrate the next big bust as any achievement of President Felipe Calderón's disastrous war on drug traffickers. The book makes it clear that when one criminal faction falls to the authorities, it's because rival gangsters engineered its demise through the authorities and enforcers on their payroll. Recommended for general collections and bookstores.—Bruce Jensen, Kutztown Univ. Lib., PA