McDermid, Val

The dead talk. To the right listener, they tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died - and who killed them. Forensic scientists can use a corpse, the scene of a crime or a single hair to unlock the secrets of the past and allow justice to be done. Bestselling crime author Val McDermid will draw on interviews with top-level professionals to delve, in her own inimitable style, into the questions and mysteries that surround this fascinating science. How is evidence collected from a brutal crime scene? What happens at an autopsy? What techniques, from blood spatter and DNA analysis to entomology, do such experts use? How far can we trust forensic evidence? Looking at famous murder cases, as well as investigations into the living - sexual assaults, missing persons, mistaken identity - she will lay bare the secrets of forensics from the courts of seventeenth-century Europe through Jack the Ripper to the cutting-edge science of the modern day.

Manchester privateeye Kate Brannigan asks her rock- journalist boyfriend to help her uncover a case of car dealership fraud. When drugs are found in the car they are using to infiltrate the business, Kate's love ends up behind bars and in grave danger.

A collection of interviews with firsthand experience with forensic scientists and the authors original interviews look at forensics.

Alex Gilbey, one of four students to discover the body of Rosie Duff, raped, stabbed, and left for dead in a cemetery, finds his life in danger twenty-five-years later when the case is reopened and two of the men who were with him that December night are mysteriously murdered.

Wordsworth scholar Jane Gresham, having grown up hearing stories that mutineer Fletcher Christian returned from exile on Pitcairn Island to live out his life in England, is inspired when a two-hundred-year-old corpse bearing South Pacific tattoos washes out of a hillside in the Lake District, to hunt for a rumored manuscript Wordsworth wrote about Christian's adventures, not realizing there are others who want the lost poem for personal gain and are willing to kill to get it.