"Savages" by Don Winslow

How to describe this book is, apparently, even one of difficulty to the publishers, as my search for a synopsis to offer a basic outline was not an easy thing by which to come – a matter I fully understand, as this new offering from one of my personally-favorite authors is unlike anything I have ever read before – his own prior books or even others.  This book takes conventional style – protagonist/antagonist, sentence structure/paragraphs/chapters, and tosses it to the curb.  The style is more poetic in form; not poetry in the more conventional fashion where every other line rhymes and there is a cadence that borders on the lyrical.  No, this is a more stylistic prose where an entire paragraph might be a single word, and a single page might be filled with one-line paragraphs.

In my view, Winslow did this to temper, pardon the pun, the savagery of the content.  A drug war between a Mexican drug cartel and two Laguna Beach pals who are exiting the business of producing the idyllic marijuana plant is not an easy business.  If it had been handled in the conventional style, with his usual approach to authenticity, it might have been too intense for many readers to handle.  
Just a guess on my part.

As to the story itself, the two pals, Ben, the brains behind the operation, and Chon, the former Navy Seal who provides the enforcing muscle, have only the return of their girlfriend, Ophelia, known affectionately, and sexually, as ‘O’ for her prowess with both in the bedroom, she is the sole impetus to action.   If they refuse the cartel’s demands, she dies a tortuous death.   And yet, just how far will they allow themselves to descend into that world where life can be extinguished at the end of a chainsaw on one person’s angry whim?

               Though stylistically the approach here is more detached than the standard of novel writing most people are used to, solid characterization still projects three-dimensional characters trapped in a story where important issues both physically concrete (the threat of cartel violence spilling across the Mexican border) and philosophically intangible (the evil that corrupts man’s souls to degrade them into the savagery of animals) are given safe space for all good people to consider so as to avoid the same traps themselves.
              While this is not a story for everyone, it is a story that will capture the attention of some - and hopefully alter a few lives, for the good, caught in the battlefield of savages.