Murder in the Bayou: Who Killed the Women Known As the Jeff Davis 8? - Hardcover

A deeply reported, and disturbing, true crime story that is as puzzling as it is intriguing. Ethan Brown s Murder in the Bayou raises as many questions as it answers, but never ceases to enrage. This is a book about power: those who wield it, and those who, tragically, fall victim to it. Janet Reitman, contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of the New York Times Notable Book Inside Scientology"

"Brown's writing is clear and approachable, and his research is meticulous...readers will be shaken by the unpleasant implications of a narrative bearing similarities to the first season of True Detective. Compulsively readable true crime provoking questions about policing, poverty, and the ritualized brutality of the rural South."--Kirkus Reviews

"The depths of the corruption detailed in the book by Brown...will make your head spin for days after you finish reading it."--Uproxx

"[A] page-turning account...filled with vivid characters...startling and haunting."--Gambit Weekly

"Doggedly researched and sensitively observed."--Gothamist

"Damn near hard to put down."--Sarah Weinman, editor of Women Crime Writers and author of Among the Wholesome Children

"Explosive."--The Huffington Post

Investigating what appeared to be a string of unsolved sex-murders that began in 2005, journalist Ethan Brown eventually uncovered a snakepit of small-town corruption in the bayou parish of Jefferson Davis, Louisiana. With its large cast of lost, doomed, and sinister characters, its dense atmosphere of menace and dread, and, at its center, a dogged reporter pursuing a mystery with the fearlessness of a pulp-fiction private eye, Brown s Murder in the Bayouis a stunning work of real-life Southern noir. --HaroldSchechter, author of The Serial Killer Files"

"Mesmerizing......a snarled web of power dynamics and deep-rooted corruption...symptomatic of a kind of system-wide brokenness that applies all over the country. ...Brown is able to show each individual victim as a real person, who is mourned and who couldn't be silenced as easily as their murderers seemed to think. "--Rolling Stone.com

"Sweeping, rigorously reported...the story has all the elements of a sordid Southern Gothic."--The New Orleans Advocate

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A SOUTHERN LIVING 2016 BOOK OF THE YEAR

An explosive, true-life southern gothic story, Murder in the Bayou chronicles the twists and turns of a high-stakes investigation into the murders of eight women in a troubled Louisiana parish.

Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of eight women were discovered around the murky canals and crawfish ponds of Jennings, Louisiana, a bayou town of 10,000 in the heart of the Jefferson Davis parish. Local law enforcement officials were quick to pursue a serial killer theory, opening a floodgate of media coverage—from CNN to The New York Times. Collectively the victims became known as the “Jeff Davis 8,” and their lives, their deaths, and the ongoing investigation reveals a small southern community’s most closely guarded secrets.

As Ethan Brown suggests, these homicides were not the work of a single serial killer, but the violent fallout of Jennings’ brutal sex and drug trade, a backwoods underworld hidden in plain sight. Mixing muckraking research and immersive journalism over the course of a five-year investigation, Ethan Brown reviewed thousands of pages of previously unseen homicide files to determine what happened during each victim’s final hours. Epic in scope and intensely suspenseful, Murder in the Bayou is the story of an American town buckling under the dark forces of poverty, race, and class division—and a lightning rod for justice for the daughters it lost.