BOOK 242: FORENSICS: THE ANATOMY OF CRIME: VAL MCDERMID

The dead talk. To the right listener, they tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died - and who killed them. Forensic scientists can use a corpse, the scene of a crime or a single hair to unlock the secrets of the past and allow justice to be done.

Bestselling crime author Val McDermid will draw on interviews with top-level professionals to delve, in her own inimitable style, into the questions and mysteries that surround this fascinating science. How is evidence collected from a brutal crime scene? What happens at an autopsy? What techniques, from blood spatter and DNA analysis to entomology, do such experts use? How far can we trust forensic evidence?

Looking at famous murder cases, as well as investigations into the living - sexual assaults, missing persons, mistaken identity - she will lay bare the secrets of forensics from the courts of seventeenth-century Europe through Jack the Ripper to the cutting-edge science of the modern day.
(From Goodreads)

MY VERDICT: I enjoyed this book, mostly because I enjoy the subject matter and find it very interesting. I’ve never read any of McDermid’s fiction as it’s not really my kind of book but I liked the way this book was written. I will say that I have read books on forensics that I have engaged with more than this one, only because it is from the point of view and written by someone who is a specialist in any of the fields discussed in the book but as an overview it was intriguing. I would recommend to someone who is interesting in learning an overview of forensic techniques.