Ciudad Juarez lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. A once-thriving border town, it now resembles a failed state. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, its murder rate exceeds that of Baghdad or Mogadishu.

In Murder City , Charles Bowden has written an extraordinary account of what happens when a city disintegrates. Interweaving stories of its inhabitants- a raped beauty queen, a repentant hit man, a journalist fleeing for his life- with a broader meditation on the town's descent into anarchy, Bowden reveals how Juarez's culture of violence will not only worsen but inevitably spread north.