BOOK REVIEW - Atrocities Too Often Forgotten

The Cry of the Innocents

by

Paul Lentz

Paul Lentz’s novel The Cry of the Innocents is a masterwork. It tells a monstrous story of human trafficking and organ harvesting in the US Southwest. Lentz is a highly gifted author whose strengths are his meticulous research skills and fluid prose.

The business of this book’s narrative involves the Russian mafia, profiteering medical administrators and practitioners, officials at privately run prisons, and corrupt and criminal government officials and employees at various local and state levels.

The heart and soul of the narrative, however, is expressed through ancient notions of honor, sanctity and justice still strong among the Hopi, Navajo and Apache. This includes a growing number of these cultures’ youth who find meaning and purpose for their lives, and moral guidance in long-standing indigenous cultural beliefs and practices.

Through the actions of the book’s ethnically diverse protagonists these spiritual and moral foundations are coupled with the secular-scientific ethos of medical science, honest law enforcement, and forensic anthropology. In opposition on the dark side are the immoral antagonists involved in illegal, for-profit human trafficking and organ harvesting and transplantation.

Though fictional, there is much truth in this book about the cruelty of the heinous transnational crimes of human trafficking and organ harvesting.

This book is a must read for most of us who know too little about the often hidden, money-driven atrocities of human trafficking and organ harvesting.