"It's Jennings, man." He gave me a friendly, almost collegial clap on the shoulder. "Welcome to the dirty south."

This was an interesting and deeply sad story. A small town, population about 10,000, has had a horrible habit of losing some of its most vulnerable members - women who are struggling on the fringes of their town - but losing them to murder.

All of these women left family behind - mothers, siblings and sometimes even children. And the mystery around all their deaths, the author's reasons to tie them together but also to tie them to certain people who maybe probably did it. It was an interesting read full of heartache but also anger. How have these not been solved?! I'm anxious to see the show they made out the book. ( )

Brown does not answer the question posed by his title, but, after reading his book, it becomes clear why the question of who killed the Jeff Davis 8 may be unanswerable. While he is not able to provide a definitive answer as to who killed the women, he is able to expose the seemingly endless corruption that mired down the investigation.

Brown's book has a journalistic tone, and he thankfully steers away from salacious detail. Instead, he shares the fruits of his exhaustive investigations, which include reviewing thousands of pages of police records and conducting extensive interviews. The book is a distillation of these efforts and is a cogent argument for possible police involvement in the murders themselves.

If you do not like to keep up with a large cast of characters, this book may not be for you. Jennings, Louisiana is small, but there are a lot of parties involved, and they have the enmeshment that will be familiar to people from small towns. Brown provides very helpful guides to aid the reader in knowing who's who. I often flipped to them, but Brown also does an admirable job of describing the players well, which makes it easier to keep people straight. There is also a timeline that helps provide context.

The book reads like an exposé, uncovering scandals in the Jennings police department and in higher levels of government. He assembles his case carefully but does not include excess details-- that said, there is still a lot of detail, because it's the nature of this particular case. ( )

Certainly very thorough, but not super engaging. Also - most of the crimes remain unsolved so you can draw conclusions but there are no answers. Also - just too many people to keep track of effectively. I kind of stopped trying to follow about half way through. ( )

good but so depressing I never want to keep reading it...maybe I'll revisit when I'm in a better head-space. ( )

I had heard a lot about this book and heard a lot about the Jeff Davis 8. The Jeff Davis 8 consisted of group of eight women who had been involved in the sex and drug trade in the heart of Jefferson Davis County in Louisiana. All of the eight had been murdered between 2005 and 2008. Ethan Brown lives in New Orleans, and he spent a great deal of time in Jefferson Davis County completing extensive research into these crimes. The real travesty is that, to this day, these crimes have not been solved. During Brown's research he finds reams of information on law enforcement staff in the County, and in what appears to be their involvement in the drug and prostitution trade. Brown does a good job in the book of presenting the story. Everything that he has written has been personally researched through arrest records, interviews with people peripheral to the case, and thorough examination of newspaper articles, land titles and internet searches. I found the book a bit of a tough slog though, as there was almost too much fact, and the back stories are revealed in bits and pieces throughout the book. I prefer to read an expose in chronological order, and with one point-of-view at a time. What Brown has exposed in this book though is chilling and frightening. How can this kind of lawlessness go on for so long, and no outside agency be called in to deal with these very serious allegations? In some ways this expose makes it a bit easier for me to understand our very own unsolved disappearances and murders along "The Highway of Tears”. Society's most vulnerable people are truly the forgotten ones in this world. ( )