'Juarez is the ideal place to kill a woman, because you're certain to get away with it. The failure to solve these killings is turning the city into a Mecca for homicidal maniacs.' (founder, Citizens Committee Against Violence)

I first heard of the crimes in Ciudad Juarez on the radio, late at night. There was darkness outside, and darkness in the report: the bodies of raped and murdered young women turning up month after month in the gutters and alleys and desert of a huge, sprawling, little-known city in Mexico, mostly at night, mostly after the women had last been seen getting off a bus taking them home from work. The images were strong, because it was the radio.

The report said someone was already in jail for an earlier series of rape-murders, but nobody knew who was continuing them: one serial killer, or several? And where did he or they live: in Juarez itself, or across the border in the US? No-one knew. The only certain thing was that the bodies kept turning up.

After that, I saw occasional pieces in the newspapers: more rapes and murders, the arrest of suspects, accusations and counter-accusations. Was the man already in jail innocent? Had he been hiring men on the outside to rape and kill the way he had done, so he could pretend the real killer or killers were still at large? What the hell was going on? Something big, that was for sure, but the outlines were only just starting to emerge. That was when Virgin approached me about writing something for a new true-crime imprint. I said I'd like to write something about Juarez. They said yes. I wrote it. - Simon Whitechapel.

"Crossing to Kill" is what resulted. The true story of the serial-killer playground. The true story of a labyrinth of mirrors. The true story of how one man, an Egyptian chemist called Abdul Latif Sharif, was directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of more than 180 young women in six years in a Mexican border city called Ciudad Juárez.

According to publisher, James Marriott, "Crossing to Kill" is a chilling look of the psychology of serial murder. "I've always been a fan of Simon Whitechapel's writing, from his unflinching essays for Headpress to the more esoteric material on his website, and I'm delighted to have been involved in publishing this, his account of the killings in Ciudad Juarez. Juarez is a Mexican border town where over 180 women have been killed in the past few years, which has made it possibly the largest case of unsolved murder in the world. Whitechapel's exhaustive research has exposed the hidden truth behind the killings."