Investigative journalist Scott Carney has spent five years on the floor tracing the lucrative and deeply secretive trade in human being bodies and body parts–avast concealed economy known as the ‘red market.’ Through the horrifying to the absurd, he discovers its varied forms: an Indian community nicknamed ‘Kidneyvakkam’ because most of its citizens have sold their kidneys for money; unethical grave robbers who grab human bones from cemeteries, morgues and funeral pyres for anatomical skeletons about The Crimson Market: For the Trail from the World’s Body organ Brokers, Bone tissue Thieves, Bloodstream Farmers and Kid Traffickers used in Western medical academic institutions and labs; a historical temple which makes money selling the locks of its devotees to wigmakers in America–to the tune of $6 million yearly; and the many techniques the fertility business have allowed human embryos and surrogate wombs to response to the logic of international markets.

The Red Marketplace reveals the rise, fall and resurgence of the multi-billion buck underground trade through history, from early medical study and modern universities to power-ravaged Eurasian villages and high-tech European labs; from body snatchers and surrogate mothers to skeleton dealers and the poor who sell areas of the body to survive. While local and international police have damaged down, improvements in science have got elevated demand for human tissue–ligaments, kidneys as well as rented space in women’s wombs–leaving little area to consider the moral dilemmas inherent in the flesh-and-blood trade. At changes tragic, voyeuristic, and believed provoking, The Red Market is an eye-opening, surreal take a look at a little-known global sector and it’s implications for our lives.