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. ( )

"Murder in the Bayou," by Ethan Brown tells the horrible story of the murder of eight "sex workers" in small-town Louisiana over the course of just four years. Eight related murders in any city is noteworthy, but in a town of 10,000 people it is almost impossible to believe that something like this could really happen. Sadly, it did.

Despite the serial killer theory being pushed by local law enforcement, it becomes obvious to anyone paying attention that the murders resulted from what was happening within the prostitution/drug trade in Jeff Davis Parish. That eight young women could die at the rate of one every few months over the four years is astounding until, according to the author, one takes local law enforcement into account. Ethan Brown agues a strong case that local cops, politicians, businessmen, and drug trade power players were directly involved in the murders. And to this day, none of the murders have been officially solved.

Ethan Brown is a brave man. He names names while detailing exactly what he thinks happened to each of the eight murder victims. He spent time in and around Jennings, Louisiana (home base for all of the animals so intimately involved with these women) interviewing as many of the key players as possible. Brown makes sense of what life must have been like in Jennings between 2005 and 2009 when the women were disappearing at such a terrible rate. What you read will disgust you, because if even only half of what Brown tells the reader is true, Jennings was a cesspool - and might still be one.

Ethan Brown is one heck of an investigator, but unfortunately "Murder in the Bayou" is a bit of an organizational mess. Brown does, for the most part, organize his book chronologically, but it is still sometimes difficult to keep up with the people who move in that world because so few of them are fleshed out to the point that they seem to be real people. That this is no "In Cold Blood" is not surprising, of course, but that may be partially because Brown had so many characters to deal with in comparison to the Capote book, and he chose to do it in relatively few pages. That said, I can't remember when I've read a book that had such an abrupt, jarring ending as this one.

Bottom Line: If this book helps finds justice for eight young women who were brutally murdered in a town in which no one with any power seemed to care, it will be long remembered. ( )