What the Dead Know
Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Now featured in the five-part docuseries on Netflix, Homicide: New York
A “remarkably candid and sensitive” (The Wall Street Journal) memoir of more than twenty years of death-scene investigations by New York City death investigator Barbara Butcher.
Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism when she found an unexpected lifeline: a job at the Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City. The second woman ever hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhattan, she was the first to last more than three months. The work was gritty, demanding, morbid, and sometimes dangerous—and she loved it.
Butcher (yes, that’s her real name, and she has heard all the jokes) spent day in and day out investigating double homicides, gruesome suicides, and most heartbreaking of all, underage rape victims who had also been murdered. In What the Dead Know, she writes with the kind of New York attitude and bravado you might expect from decades in the field, investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, 680 of which were homicides. In the opening chapter, she describes how just from sheer luck of having her arm in a cast, she avoided a boobytrapped suicide. Later in her career, she describes working the nation’s largest mass murder, the attack on 9/11, where she and her colleagues initially relied on family members’ descriptions to help distinguish among the 21,900 body parts of the victims.
This is the “breathtakingly honest, compassionate, and raw” (Patricia Cornwell), “completely unputdownable” (Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Left Undone) real-life story of a woman who, in dealing with death every day, learned surprising lessons about life—and how some of those lessons saved her from becoming a statistic herself. Fans of Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, and true crime won’t be able to put this down.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Butcher, the chief of staff at New York City's office of the chief medical examiner, artfully integrates her personal struggles into this riveting debut memoir that doubles as an inside look at the work of medicolegal investigators. As as a teen, Butcher dealt with her suicidal depression by turning to drugs. She blew multiple opportunities, including a college scholarship, but was transformed by a chance intervention: the director of a nursing home on Long Island who hired Butcher to help orient dementia patients suggested she look into becoming a physician's assistant. That led Butcher to land an entry-level investigative position with New York's chief medical examiner in 1992, and she eventually rose through the ranks to become his top aide. Butcher shares some of the grisly tricks of her trade, such as how best to roll over a corpse to look for evidence, and gravely recounts her more sensitive inquiries, including her efforts to identify remains from 9/11. Throughout, though, she employs welcome doses of dark humor and makes even the more complicated aspects of her work fully accessible to a lay audience. Readers interested in how real-life CSI functions will be rapt.
Customer Reviews
Captivating, entertaining, and eye-opening
Not just the gory crime scenes but the author’s perspective on how the job affected her and her strength to survive.
Gritty, exciting and above all, very real!
Strongly recommended!