Beware the gritty social realist journalist who wants to take you There.

There is generally a place you’d rather not be: a crack house, a prison, or a refugee camp. And it’s a rare writer who has enough subtlety, intelligence and understanding to guide you successfully.

In Somebody’s Daughter: Inside the Halifax-Toronto Pimping Ring, journalist Phonse Jessome takes you inside a Halifax-based pimping ring. But he’s not one of those rare writers. Grit abounds in this tell-all true story about a handful of young Nova Scotia girls who are lured into prostitution by a wily gang of pimps, and are later rescued by kind-hearted police in a 1992 crackdown.

The situation offers plenty of fodder for book-length discussion. Many of the girls come from abusive families. Others, from small-town poverty, find prostitution a glamorous way out. And with the majority of pimps black and the majority of the girls white, there’s fascinating racial politics to explore. In Jessome’s hands, however, Somebody’s Daughter veers very quickly into made-for-TV movie territory.

Impossibly naive, nubile girls sashay unwillingly in high heels. Handsome yet cruel pimps beat them mercilessly. A former battered wife searches tearfully for her runaway prostitute daughter. And to make matters worse, Jessome insists upon using the vernacular – continually referring to prostitution as The Game and one of the pimps as the Big Man.

To his credit, Jessome has genuinely good intentions and compassion for his subjects. He doesn’t, however, make any attempt to put teenage prostitution into any greater context, or offer any solutions to the social issues he raises. And by skimming the surface with melodramatic, fly-on-the-wall journalism verité, Jessome hasn’t written a book; he’s written a tabloid exposé in serious need of editing.