Journalist Muse's beautifully written debut takes a deep dive into the Colombian drug trade. In fascinating detail, Muse describes how leaves harvested from the coca fields in the nation's mountains and jungles go to rustic labs, where workers produce coca paste. Then it's on to the narco-militias, who turn the paste into bricks of cocaine and sell them to drug traffickers in Medellín. Distribution efforts involve shipping massive amounts of cocaine via drug mules via airplanes, as well as speed boats and semi-subs that play nautical cat-and-mouse with the U.S. Coast Guard. At great personal risk, the author interviewed Colombians involved in the trade--dealers, prostitutes, and sicarios (the paid assassins who keep the law of the drug trade); their intimate stories form the heart of the book. A young Medellín coke trafficker, Alex, is surprisingly open about his life of crime, and while he's far from sympathetic, readers will feel sad when he's gunned down at a birthday party in front of his fiancé. In the bleak epilogue, Muse offers hope, but sees no end to the "forever war on drugs." This gripping account will linger in the mind of readers. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, Ross Yoon Literary. (Mar.)

Cocaine darkens the souls of all it touches in a foreign correspondent's chilling eyewitness account of the barbarous world of Colombian drug trafficking. In September 2016, after a ghastly civil war that claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) reached a groundbreaking peace accord that promised to usher in a new era of prosperity for the bloodied and beleaguered South American nation. Sadly, those hopes were almost immediately extinguished as warring narcomilitias unleashed a fresh round of chaos--all created around the production and distribution of cocaine. Muse, a British American writer who has also reported from Iraq and Syria, was there for much of the bloodletting. Based in Bogotà for 15 years, he spent countless hours among hard-pressed coca farmers, downtrodden coca pickers, impoverished gang members, and numerous other players caught up in Colombia's unending cycle of money and death. "Cocaine is capitalism, stripped of any veneer of respectability," writes the author. "It's the law of the market wrapped in blood and claws." Like other daring foreign correspondents, Sebastian Junger and Chris Hedges among them, Muse has a talent for recognizing the intrinsic humanity in all his subjects, no matter how monstrously they may behave. Along the way, he chronicles his interactions with a dead-eyed sicario who prays tenderly to the Virgin Mary before every assignment and a ruthless Medellin drug trafficker who fantasizes about quitting the game and settling into domestic bliss. No one in the kingdom of cocaine--not those responsible for producing the drug, nor those charged with shutting them down--can ever truly hope to escape unscathed, however. Each kilo may come at a cost too high to bear, but Muse clearly shows that there will always be those willing to pay with their lives. An unrelentingly tragic yet indispensable exposé of the never-ending war on drugs. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.