The Casebook of Forensic Detection: How Science Solved 100 of the World's Most Baffling Crimes

by Colin Evans

Book Overview

Updated with new material, this collection vividly depicts the horrendous crimes, colorful detectives, and grueling investigations that shaped the science of forensics. In concise, fascinating detail, Colin Evans shows how far forensic science has come from Sherlock Holmes's magnifying glass. No crime in this book is ordinary, and many of the perpetrators are notorious: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, John List, Bruno Hauptmann, Jeffrey Macdonald, and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0425215598
• ISBN13: 9780425215593
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group
• Length: 367 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Intriguing!

If you love the show Forensic Files (and who reading this review doesn't? : ) you'll enjoy reading in this book, as I did, even more details of the true crimes and masterful forensic exploits on which several episodes of the TV show were based.

This is an awesome book!

This book was really, really great. It's such that you can read it over and over. I really like it because if one story doesn't particularly interest you (barely any in here!), it'll be over in a few pages and you can get onto the next one. It's awesome. I LOVE forensics, and it's often way cooler to study when IT REALLY HAPPENED- in your world, perhaps even in your lifetime. If you like forensics and collections of short stories, then this is the PERFECT book for you. Buy it; you won't be sorry!!

Outstanding general history of forensics and reference book

This is the perfect starter book for anyone interested in forensics. It is organized by forensic discipline, then chronologically within each section. The author covers a number of famous cases, but has also included many more that are obscure, but equally fascinating. Each case is described ecomonically, but there is enough detail given to fully describe the case and the forensic techniques used to solve it. The writing is plain, precise, and jargon-free. This book is also an excellent reference volume. The index and table of contents make it easy to find a specific case and I refer to this book often while reading other true crime or forensics book for names, dates, etc. Anyone looking for a well-written, informative forensic science book need go no further than this book.

Excellent for students

I just recently finished reading this excellent novel about science. I loved this book. If I could reccommend this book to a student in the highschool I would. This book is great for teenagers on up who are interested on learning about forensic sciences.

Very good book on subject

This is a fascinating book if you can put up with a murder every few pages, knowing that these murders took place in real life. The author weaves information about the history of each method of detection in with the details of each crime -- kind of like Crichton's book "Five Patients." The author is occasionally given to a little bit of hyperbole, but it's an excellent read for anyone interested in forensics. Here's one of the stories: It's about a woman who planted cyanide-laced Excedrin in various stores, to cover up the fact that she used cyanide-laced Excedrin to kill her husband. The twist is that when her husband died, the doctor mistakenly recorded the cause as emphysema, not poison. Because of the mistaken diagnosis of the cause of her husband's death, the widow/ murderer would only have gotten $31,000 insurance, instead of the $176,000 insurance she would have gotten if his death was accidental poisoning. She wanted the extra money badly enough that not only did she call the doctor several times to ask him if he could have been mistaken, but she called the police to ask if her husband's death could be related to a local cyanide/Excedrin death (caused by her planted Excedrin in a drug store causing an innocent death). Investigating as she requested, not only did the police prove that her husband was poisoned, but the police proved that she was the one who did the poisoning, earning her a 90-year prison sentence.