The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly

The Scarecrow is a thriller about an evil computer system administrator who tortures and kills women after using his position to spy on them. Will the heroic newspaper columnist, recently laid off but still working his last couple of weeks on the job, be able to catch him before he gets caught in the vilain’s [...]

Zero at the Bone by John Heidenry

Zero at the Bone tells the story of a botched kidnapping by two alcoholic low-lives who, it seems, drank so much after they got the ransom that they fumbled into swift discovery and a very swift trip to the gas chamber. The kidnapping itself is grisly, as the hapless boy is swiftly killed, and then [...]

Cracking Cases by Henry Lee

Cracking Cases recalls five murder cases (including the OJ Simpson trial) that the author helped solve, or disprove, using forensic evidence. Alas, like Teasing Secrets from the Dead and How Not to Die, recently reviewed on this blog, Cracking Cases heavily underscores the heavy burden of forensics experts (missing Christmas dinner, missing Thanksgiving, in such [...]

Teasing Secrets from the Dead by Emily Craig

Teasing Secrets from the Dead is a memoir by a forensic anthropologist who covers her training (she was a latecomer to the field, starting as a medical illustrator and, most notably, a frustrated would-be physician) and describes a variety of crime scenes she helped investigate, from anonymous, run-of-the-mill crimes to the very famous including Waco, [...]

Picking Cotton by Jennifer Thompson-Cannino et al.

Picking Cottonis the story of justice gone awry: a young woman is raped, picks her attacker in a lineup, and causes to send him to jail — but he’s really not her attacker, just someone who looks like him, and it will take 11 long years for him to prove, through DNA matching, a technique [...]

A Person of Interest by Susan Choi

A Person of Interest opens as Dr. Lee’s office mate receives a package in the mail that contains a bomb that shatters his and Dr Lee’s office. Dr. Lee, a mathematician who immigrated from China, is a solitary man whose two wives have deserted him and whose daughter moved away and is rarely in touch. In [...]

A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Tolz

A Fraction of the Whole is a grandiose saga of the Dean family, starting and ending in Australia but ranging to Paris and Thailand with unprobable situations every few pages but anchored in the outsized and definitely out-of-the-norm personalities of the narrator’s father and uncle. I thought the first part (based in Australia) was brilliant. [...]