Jan Burke wrote what would become the first of ten crime novels featuring journalist Irene Kelly in the evening hours after work. That manuscript, Goodnight, Irene (1993), sold to Simon & Schuster without the benefit of an agent or solicitation—and readers took note when then-President Bill Clinton mentioned it during his first White House interview…
Aaron Elkins’ Old Bones, the fourth novel in the Gideon Oliver Mysteries series, won the Edgar Award in 1988 and has been continuously in print since then. With its elegant prose and dialogue-heavy writing, the book is a master class in classic whodunits and one of the first modern novels to delve deep into forensic…
You’ve probably watched one of the many “forensic” shows that fill our TV screens. In the course of an hour, our amazing forensic scientists track down the perpetrator using all sorts of whizz-bang machines that go beep. One of these is invariably going to be the “fingerprint” matching computer program. You know the conversation… “We’ve…
The final episode of Beyond Reasonable Doubt, “Murder in Vegas,” will be airing this Sunday, July 9th at 8 pm ET/PT. Are you ready? Buckle up, because this is yet another thrilling inside look into a high-profile murder case that used a new scientific technique to help solve the case. This time, we’re in Las…
Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert by Patricia Cornwell is a comprehensive and intriguing exposé of one of the world’s most chilling cases of serial murder—and the police force that failed to solve it (available February 28, 2017). In 2001, acclaimed crime novelist Patricia Cornwell stepped away from fiction to investigate the facts and fallacies…
An apt description of forensic evidence: “…This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it,…
The Scientist and the Forger by Dr. Jehane Ragai outlines the advanced forensic techniques being developed to help thwart art forgery. If you’ve watched CSI or any of the other TV forensic procedurals, you know that science has jumped into the crime-solving pool with both feet. Advances in DNA analysis, latent-print recovery, forensic botany, and…
Shrunk by J. Thomas Dalby, et al. is a true crime collection of stories from forensic psychologists that delves deep into the fragile human psyche to attempt to explore the links between mental illness and crime. Shrunk is a collection of powerful chapters by eminent forensic psychologists and psychiatrists who write about mental health issues…
In her first Gardiner and Renner novel, That Darkness, bestselling author Lisa Black draws from her experience as a forensic investigator to create two fascinating characters in crime fiction: a killer with a unique sense of justice and a woman in a lifelong relationship with death. As a forensic investigator for the Cleveland Police Department,…
Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us About Crime by Val McDermid is a sprawling history of forensic science that utilizes first-hand accounts and interviews from experts in the field, and is the perfect reference guide for anyone interested in forensics. Forensics is nominated for the 2016 Edgar Award for Best Fact…
