Abetted by gangs of people smugglers, today human trafficking is the fastest-growing criminal industry in the world. As governments spend more than ever on policing borders, this ground-breaking investigation reveals a secretive world where lives don't matter, but where every body counts.

From the Mediterranean to the English Channel, the Rio Grande to Thailand, at any moment there are over 280 million people attempting to emigrate. While most migrants take legal channels, those outside the system represent financial potential for the corrupt. Sex trafficking, drug mules, organ trading, forced labour; the flow of desperate people generates billions of dollars annually, not only for smugglers who get them across borders, but also for traffickers.

Every body has a price, as the veteran investigative journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau knows. Yet no other multi-billion pound transnational enterprise is less understood than the trade in humans, a fact that organised crime networks increasingly exploit as turn to migration for their profits. From the criminal underworld to the highest echelons of national institutions, from mafia cartels to glamorous fashion houses, banks, and governments, this ground-breaking investigation follows the money to reveal a clandestine industry.

Barbie Latza Nadeau is the author of three previous books, most recently The Godmother: Murder, Vengeance, and the Bloody Struggle of Mafia Women. Based in Italy, where she is a news reporter and producer for CNN, she has been reporting on human trafficking since 1998, when she was bureau chief for Newsweek magazine.