I think I picked this up at my local Waterstones just after christmas, I was drawn in by the cover, the story sounded interesting and it has been short listed for a prize. I hadn't heard of Sam Hawken and I didn't realise that the story is based loosely around a real life phenomenom of women going missing and turning up dead in Juarez, Mexico.

The book starts with Kelly Courter who is a likeable character who is down on his luck and an ex drug addict trying to make ends meet by boxing in matches he has no chance or desire to win. Kelly and his back story is developed a little as the book goes on but I would have liked to know more about him. By the end of the book I felt pity but also dislike towards him and like all the charcaters in the book there just seems to be something missing from him.

Hawken seems to repeat several things throughout the book, he like vomit and urinating blood it would seem. There is also some sex in the book which seems graphic for the sake of being graphic and not much else. I suspect he was trying to make the story edgy and gritty but in these places it falls down. This is a shame because the descriptions of the places and the dusty, dry oppressive atompshere is got across very well and sets a really effective tone.

Overall its pretty easy to read and I kept picking it up to read whenever I had a spare 10 or 15 minutes. I found it to be ok, the story is predictable in a lot of places and I feel Hawken missed a trick in one part of the story when he went in one direction where another would have been better. I also couldn't help but feel that it was being set up for a sequel. ( )

Some nice work here but some idd choices also. We start off with one character following his journey closely but then a third of the way through he is taken off the chessboard and we're suddenly following a different character. There's even a third introduced but he doesn't get to do anything significant and the whole thing kinda fizzles out. Promises some but mildly under-delivers. ( )

There's noir, crime novels with a gritty edge, with characters on the edge of society, and a sense that things may well not work out in the end, and then there is noir. This is of this second, harsher kind. In Ciudad Juarez, women have been disappearing for years, hundreds gone without knowing what happened to them. Kelly is a washed-up boxer, an ex-heroin addict and sometime drug dealer. He's trying to get back in shape and he loves his boss and best friend's sister, who works for a group of mothers of disappeared women. He is sometimes visited by Sevilla, an old school narco detective, back from the days before police drove armored cars and wore body armor. He's trying to cultivate Kelly as an informer, but so far he hasn't had any luck.

In tone, The Dead Women of Juarez is similar to David Peace's Red Riding Quartet. But this suits the world in which Hawken has set his novel, the city of Juarez, Mexico. A sprawling border city where women living in dirt-floored shanties travel hours each day to earn a dollar or two an hour in factories run by multi-national corporations, a city where American tourists venture only for a bit of illicit fun and cheap prescription medicines. A place where money buys you whatever you want and if you have any you travel with bodyguards in cars with darkened windows. It's a place where a person can disappear if they want, or someone wants them to, and often without a trace.

Kelly is an interesting character to follow. He loves Paloma and he wants to be better, but he's not someone you'd ever want to cross paths with. Paloma is tough and street-wise and more than a match for Kelly, but a woman in Juarez is always vulnerable and the activities of her brother and her boyfriend don't make her any safer. The detective, Sevilla, is a has-been, still coming in to work despite being superfluous. He may not be corrupt, but that may not matter since he has no real authority.

The Dead Women of Juarez is a harsh read, but that suits its setting in a harsh, unforgiving place, where women disappear and those who remain may never have answers. ( )

The short description of the books makes you believe this is a detective novel where two unlikely characters solve a problem around a disappeared woman. Prepare for a much harsher read, a tale about a place where the life of a woman has no value. A place where corruption rules and keeps the truth about the disappearances of women hidden. Where violence is normal, even (or especially) in what is supposed to be the justice system. The main characters gain more and more detail, often ugly, building a picture of how people cope with a life where violence rules. The locations, the events - same thing, build up step by step, and likely not too fictional. Not a pretty book, not a nice detective novel, a very good read though. ( )