Corpse
Nature, Forensics, And The Struggle To Pinpoint Time Of Death
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- ¥1,600
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- ¥1,600
発行者による作品情報
When detectives come upon a murder victim, there's one thing they want to know above all else: When did the victim die? The answer can narrow a group of suspects, make or break an alibi, even assign a name to an unidentified body. But outside the fictional world of murder mysteries, time-of-death determinations have remained infamously elusive, bedeviling criminal investigators throughout history. Armed with an array of high-tech devices and tests, the world's best forensic pathologists are doing their best to shift the balance, but as Jessica Snyder Sachs demonstrates so eloquently in Corpse, this is a case in which nature might just trump technology: Plants, chemicals, and insects found near the body are turning out to be the fiercest weapons in our crime-fighting arsenal. In this highly original book, Sachs accompanies an eccentric group of entomologists, anthropologists, biochemists, and botanists -- a new kind of biological "Mod Squad" -- on some of their grisliest, most intractable cases. She also takes us into the courtroom, where "post-O.J." forensic science as a whole is coming under fire and the new multidisciplinary art of forensic ecology is struggling to establish its credibility. Corpse is the fascinating story of the 2000year search to pinpoint time of death. It is also the terrible and beautiful story of what happens to our bodies when we die.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1932, Arthur Koehler helped catch a notorious suspect wanted for the Lindbergh baby murder by tracing a wooden ladder from a sawmill to a lumberyard and finally to the killer thereby giving rise to forensic botany. By elucidating such rare moments in history, Sachs, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Discover, Parenting and Redbook, examines the often distasteful world of the forensic sciences. And while this first book is a serious scientific investigation, it also manages to bring forensic science (specifically, forensic ecology) into the layman's arena, pursuing what Sachs calls "the postmortem stopwatch" namely, the means by which investigators can better determine the time of death. Following various forensics experts on investigations, she conducts an intense study of the differences between rigor, livor and algor mortis; the analysis of stomach contents; the discerning tastes of flies; and bodily juices sluiced into soil. The book is sure to please readers interested in the processes of death and decomposition: this is the world of maggot instars and the generational cycles of "Great Sarcophagi." Appearing on the tail of Michael Baden's Dead Reckoning(Forecasts, July 23), the book brings to the fore some familiar characters (entomologist Wayne Lord and Bill Bass of the University of Tennessee's "Body Farm," among others), and in comparison, Sachsdoesn't give enough time to the link between the forensic sciences and criminal investigative tactics. While the second half of the book examines practical applications of such methods, readers might not get the sense of what all this forensics hullabaloo amounts to in a court of law or anywhere else outside of the laboratory.
