Corpse: Nature, forensics and the struggle to pinpoint time of death by Jessica Snyder Sachs, Perseus, $25, ISBN 073820336X
AMID the plethora of popular books on forensic science, it’s hard for writers to find a new slant. But Jessica Sachs has found one: her main themes are entomology, botany and ecology, and in particular how they help to establish time of death. Thankfully, Sachs fully acknowledges the biological variations that prohibit the ludicrous accuracy with which time of death is estimated in so many novels and television dramas.
Corpse uses case histories to illustrate the biological methods available to investigators.…
