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Kilo

Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels—from the Jungles to the Streets

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

For fans of the Netflix show Narcos and readers of true crime, Kilo is a deeply reported account of life inside Colombia's drug cartels, using unprecedented access in the cartels to trace a kilo of cocaine—from the fields where it is farmed, to the hit men who protect it, to the smuggling ships that bring it to American shores.

""Toby Muse's tautly written account of his intimate prowl through Colombia's narco world is both compelling and unforgettable. With Kilo, cocaine now has its own Dispatches. Simply kickass."

— Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker and author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life


Cocaine is glamour, sex and murder. From the badlands of Colombia, it stretches across the globe, seducing, corrupting and destroying. A product that must be produced, distributed, and protected, it is both a harbinger of violence and a source of immense wealth. Beginning in the jungles and mountains of Colombia, it filters down to countryside villages and the nightclubs of the cities, attracting money, sex, and death. Each step in the life of a kilo reveals a different criminal underworld with its own players, rules, and dangers, ranging from the bizarre to the diabolical. The killers, the drug-lords, all find themselves seduced by cocaine and trapped in her world.

Seasoned war correspondent Toby Muse has witnessed each level of this underworld, fueled by the appetite for cocaine in America and Europe. In this riveting chronicle, he takes the reader inside Colombia's notorious drug cartels to offer a never before look at the drug trade. Following a kilo of cocaine from its production in a clandestine laboratory to the smugglers who ship it abroad, he reveals the human lives behind the drug's complicated legacy. Reporting on Colombia for the world's most prestigious networks and publications, Muse gained unprecedented access to the extraordinary people who survive on the drug trade—farmers, smugglers, assassins—and the drug lords and their lovers controlling these multi-billion dollar enterprises. Uncovering stories of violence, sex, and money, he shows the allure and the madness of cocaine. And how the War on Drugs has been no match for cocaine.

Piercing this veiled world, Kilo is a gripping portrait of a country struggling to end this deadly trade even as the riches flow. A human portrait of criminals and the shocking details of their lives, Kilo is a chilling, unforgettable story that takes you deep into the belly of the beast.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 23, 2020
      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.

    • Kirkus

      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 Bogot� 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 expos� of the never-ending war on drugs.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)

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