ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patricia Hunt Holmes spent thirty years as a public finance attorney with the international law firm of Vinson & Elkins LLP of Houston, Texas. She was consistently listed in Best Lawyers in America, Texas Super Lawyers, and Top Lawyers in Houston and awarded the highest degree by her peers in Martindale Hubbell. She was a frequent speaker at national public finance and health-care conferences. Holmes has also served on the faculty of the University of Missouri—Columbia, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. She has written and published in the fields of intellectual history and law.

      Searching for Pilar is her first novel.

FICTION

Patricia Hunt Holmes

Searching for Pilar

River Grove Books

Paperback, 978-1-63299-153-9 (also available as ebook); 320 pages, $16.95

April 10, 2018

In stark, disturbing detail, Searching for Pilar confronts the grim crime of sex trafficking in Mexico and the United States and shows how difficult it can be for law-enforcement authorities to take actions to stop it.

This first novel by Houston writer Patricia Hunt Holmes is “inspired by real events and informed by experts.” It takes the reader into the darkest heart of an inhumane underworld business.

Naïve and economically desperate young women from small towns in Mexico, many of them teenagers, are lured to Mexico City with the promise that they will be interviewed for good-paying jobs. Instead, once they show up, they are drugged, secretly thrown into windowless vans, and taken by cartel members out into the countryside to secret compounds protected by heavily armed guards. There, the young women are raped repeatedly, beaten and tortured into submission.

Later, still heavily guarded and unable to alert anyone that they need help, the young women are smuggled into the United States and forced to work in “gentlemen’s” clubs, brothels, cantinas, and other sites. If they refuse to perform sex acts for customers, they could be beaten and possibly killed. And harm could come to their families back in Mexico, as well.

This is the fate that has ensnared one of the novel’s central characters, 19-year-old Pilar Carmen Chavez Gonzales, who has an infant daughter. She and her husband, Alejandro, both have lost their jobs recently in an economic downturn. She is invited to a job interview in Mexico City, where she has never been. After she is given a drink to celebrate her “hiring,” she wakes up in captivity, bound and unable to let anyone know where she is.

Mexican authorities immediately are fearful to try to find her, because cartel thugs will come after them and their family members, too, in retribution. But they think Pilar likely will be sent to Houston.

Eventually, she is taken to Houston, which, another character notes, is “the largest hub for sex slavery in the United States.” At least half of the young women who are trafficked in the U.S. are young American runaways who get trapped by pimps. Also, young women from numerous foreign countries are forced to work in strip clubs or massage parlors or to cater to the desires of crew members from ships docked in the Port of Houston.

Only Pilar’s older brother, Diego, a rising soccer star in Mexico, has enough resources to attempt a search for her. It will be a long quest in very dangerous places. What will Pilar be like if she is eventually rescued? And would she be accepted again by her husband and other members of her family?

The writing in Searching for Pilar generally is good. And the violent scenes that focus on Pilar’s and other young women’s treatment in captivity are handled with a skillful restraint that does not diminish the horror. One distraction, however, is that some of the book’s characters sometimes become too wordy while exchanging information that moves the story along. In real life, people seldom speak in long paragraphs.

The novel spans nearly 300 pages and is divided into twenty-nine chapters. The final chapter is followed by a question-and-answer session with the author, who describes the process of how the book was researched and written. Also included are thirteen reading-guide questions that delve into the decisions, the actions or inactions, and the beliefs of the book’s key characters.

Searching for Pilar is an important and informative novel that puts much-needed spotlights on the shadowy, brutal and frequently deadly world of sex trafficking.

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