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

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 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!!

This is an ideal book for a student of forensic science or law, who may need help to find out various cases for their studies. It gives a guide to many different cases throughout the last century, with enough detail for the student to be able to do further research.Each new section has a brief review of what the subject matter is eg Ballistics. Colin tells a little of what ballistics is about, including some history, then he writes a little about the subject of firearms and then what can happen when firearms are fired. Other subjects covered are Cause of Death, Disputed Documents, DNA Typing, Explosives and Fire, Fingerprinting, Forensic Anthropology, Odontology, Psychological Profiling, Identification of Remains, Serology, Time of Death, Toxicology, Trace Evidence and Voiceprints.The appendix in the book is on Forensic Pioneers and Their Cases and here Colin lists 9 forensic scientists giving their year of birth and if dead, their year of death, also a brief outline of their career or some other pertinent detail, with a list of the significant cases which they worked on.This book is well written and with enough detail to give those who are not involved in this field a very enjoyable read.

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.

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.

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.