Noche Roja (Vertigo Crime)
Ex-cop Jack Cohen, now a hard-drinking home-security salesman, is hired by aid worker Paloma Flores to find out who’s killing young women who work in sweatshops just south of the U.S.-Mexico border. Many have died, she says, and no one’s doing anything. Cohen takes the job, but he is haunted by something from his past, and Flores’ hiring of him isn’t what it seems to be, either. Latour’s art, dark with silhouettes and shadows, textured with halftone dots suggesting newsprint, is atmospherically effective if somewhat inconsistent; some faces are rendered more realistically, while others are more cartoonishly stylized. But Oliver’s tale of abused people trapped in hopeless circumstances is wrenching, and its resonance with reality—serial killers on the blood-drenched border, poverty-stricken “free trade zones,” government corruption and profiteering—gives it real power. It’s easy to imagine readers racing from the first page to the last without stopping, taking a deep breath, and then starting over. --Keir Graff