杏吧原创

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鈥檚 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. Naturally, the book is heavily US-orientated, both in the cases and in the selection of experts and publications-even though most temperature-based methods were developed in Europe.

Perhaps Sachs has cast her net a little too widely in trying to do justice to every aspect of the field. The methods used in the first 24 hours-of most concern to police-she deals with relatively briefly, compared with the longer-term techniques of insect and plant maturation, which are obviously Sachs鈥檚 main interest. However, this is a readable and informative work. It concentrates on entomology, but also shows how root growth, tree rings and chemical, botanical and zoological processes can be used as calendar for dating human remains.

For a journalist not actually in the forensic science business, Sachs is generally accurate, though there are a few howlers. Bill Sturner, one of the pioneers of time-of-death estimation from the potassium content of the fluid inside the eye, will no doubt be surprised to read that he is from the 鈥淗ungarian Institute of Forensic Medicine, Budapest鈥�, since he鈥檚 the Medical Examiner of Little Rock, Arkansas.

Such nit-picking notwithstanding, the book is genuinely interesting and well worth reading.