# Read the first page of The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow Read the opening of The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow free, no signup. An obsessive DEA agent wars against a rising Mexican drug empire. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-power-of-the-dog-don-winslow - Genre: Crime fiction - Year: 2005 - ISBN: 9781400044849 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781400044849&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781400044849 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781400044849 ## The opening The baby is dead in his mother’s arms. Art Keller can tell from the way the bodies lie—her on top, the baby beneath her—that she tried to shield her child. She must have known, Art thinks, that her own soft body could not have stopped bullets—not from automatic rifles, not from that range—but the move must have been instinctive. A mother puts her own body between her child and harm. So she turned, twisted as the bullets hit her, then fell on top of her son. Did she really think that she could save the child? Maybe she didn’t, Art thinks. Maybe she just didn’t want the baby to see death blaze out from the barrel of the gun. Maybe she wanted her child’s last sensation in this world to be that of her bosom. Enfolded in love. Art is a Catholic. At forty-seven years of age, he’s seen a lot of madonnas. But nothing like this one. “Cuernos de chivo,” he hears someone say. Quietly, almost whispered, as if they were in church. Cuernos de chivo. Horns of the goat: AK-47s. Art already knows that—hundreds of 7.62-mm shell casings lie on the patio’s concrete floor, along with some .12-gauge shotgun shells and some 5.56s, probably, Art thinks, from AR-15s. But most of the casings are from the cuernos de chivo, the favored weapon of the Mexican narcotraficantes. Nineteen bodies. Nineteen more casualties in the War on Drugs, Art thinks. He’s used to looking at the bodies from his fourteen-year war with Adán Barrera—he’s looked at many. But not nineteen. Not women, children, babies. Not this. Ten men, three women, six children. Lined up against the patio wall and shot. Blasted is more the word, Art thinks. Blasted to pieces in an incontinent rush of bullets. The amount of blood is unreal. A pool the size of a large car, an inch thick with black, dried blood. Blood splattered on the walls, blood splattered on the manicured lawn, where it glistens black-red on the tips of the grass. The blades of which look to him like tiny, bloody swords. They must have put up a fight as they realized what was about to happen. Pulled from their beds in the middle of the night, dragged out to the patio, lined up against the wall—someone had finally offered a struggle, because furniture is tipped over. Heavy wrought-iron patio furniture. Glass shattered on the concrete. Art looks down and sees . . . Christ, it’s a doll—its brown glass eyes staring up at him—lying in the blood. A doll, and a small cuddly animal, and a beautifully rendered pinto horse in plastic, all lying in blood by the execution wall. Children, Art thinks, pulled out of sleep, grab their toys and hold on to them. Even as, especially as, the guns roar. An irrational image comes to him: a stuffed elephant. A childhood toy he always slept with. It had one button eye. It was stained with vomit, with urine, with all the various childhood effluvia, and it smelled of all of them. His mother had sneaked it away in his sleep and replaced it with a new elephant with two eyes and a pristine aroma, and when Art woke up he thanked her for the new elephant and then found and retrieved the old one from the trash. Arthur Keller hears his own heart break. He switches his gaze to the adult victims. Some are in pajamas—expensive silk pajamas and negligees—some in T-shirts. Two of them, a man and a woman, are naked—as if they had been grabbed from a postcoital sleeping embrace. What once had been love, Art thinks, is now naked obscenity. ## Books with a similar feel - [The Black Hand by Chris Blatchford](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-black-hand-chris-blatchford.md) - [Gone, Baby, Gone by Dennis Lehane](https://uncovered.ink/read/gone-baby-gone-dennis-lehane.md) - [The Snowman by Jo Nesbo](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-snowman-jo-nesbo.md) - [Open Season by C. J. Box](https://uncovered.ink/read/open-season-c-j-box.md) - [Blue Heaven by C.J. Box](https://uncovered.ink/read/blue-heaven-c-j-box.md) - [The Law of Innocence by Michael Connelly](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-law-of-innocence-michael-connelly.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.