Teasing Secrets from the Dead: My Investigations at America's Most Infamous Crime Scenes by Emily Craig PhD.

I found Teasing Secrets from the Dead while digging through the stack of true crime books at Half-Price books. When I saw that Kathy Reichs, writer of the Temperance Brennan books and forensic anthropologist herself, wrote an introduction to this book, I decided to pick it up and give it a try. It wasn’t bad, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed paying full price for it.

Emily Craig started out as a medical artist, drawing detailed anatomy pictures for a medical laboratory. She describes how that interest led her to switch her career path to forensic anthropology, and gives you a short section on how her training and study went. She describes the difficulty of marrying fact and intuition, of the long hours of study, and of the differences in forensic anthropology and forensic pathology. Later she describes her work as a full-time employee in Kentucky, and they types of work she does there identifying remains most often found in the back country areas. She is candid about the difficulties of matching remains with missing persons, and definitely rips those CSI blinders off. It’s a lot harder to do this job than TV might make you think. It’s gruesome work, so I don’t recommend eating while you read.

Craig’s tale becomes really interesting when she gets into the chapters on the Branch Davidians in Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the World Trade Center attacks. In Waco, she is the scientist who reconstructed David Koresh’s skull, and before that, the one who reconstructed the skull that showed not all the cult members died because of the fire (she found evidence of a bullet hole). In OKC, she helped rebut claims that the real bomber died in the explosion by identifying that the true owner of an extra severed limb did in fact belong to a victim who was inside the building. Her chapter on the World Trade Center was devastating and emotional, and you can tell the difficulties faced by those workers will never be truly understood by anyone not there to share their burdens. In fact, it is the one chapter where it doesn’t feel like Dr. Craig is bragging.

That is the one thing I had an issue with when reading this book. Dr. Craig’s tone was almost condescending and self-involved, especially when describing the “intuition” side of things. Another thing that was not fun to read– the constant descriptions of maggots. Seriously, yuck. Other than that, it was interesting to get a factual account of how someone becomes a forensic anthropologist and the difficulty of being in that profession.

Rating: 3 1/2 Purrs