forensics

"Written by mortician and forensic expert Carla Valentine, The Science of Murder explores the real-life cases that inspired Agatha Christie and shows how the great mystery writer may have kept up to date with the latest developments in forensic science, from ballistics to blood-splatter analysis. Valentine examines the use of fingerprints, firearms, handwriting, impressions, and toxicology in Christie's novels, before finally revealing the role the dead body itself played in offering vital clues to dastardly crimes"--.

"This book looks at how forensics is used to solve violent crimes" --from the back cover.

Relocating to Charleston after a particularly grueling case, Dr. Kay Scarpetta opens a private forensic pathology practice but is quickly targeted by local politics and a covert saboteur before a series of violent deaths brings her skills into high view.

Like many in Montreal, Tempe cares little for what gangs of bikers do to each other - until a little girl is caught in their crossfire. It takes all of her forensic ability to straighten out the mess of bodies that amass.

When an explosion rips through a residential neighborhood in LA, leaving 20 people dead, forensic pathologist Joanna Blalock must make sense of the scene. It is really a crime done by incompetent terrorists, or is there a larger agenda, utilizing plastic explosives?.

After reluctantly agreeing to help film a documentary promoting a center for Egyptian studies located in the Nile Valley, forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver becomes enmeshed in a case with a wandering skeleton and a murdered professor.

What happened to Sir John Franklin's ill-fated Arctic exploration of 1845-48? In 1981 the mystery was solved. Forensic work done on three perfectly preserved Victorian seamen discovered on Beechey Island disclosed the cause of death in the the men of the expedition.

In 1793 when French Queen Marie-Antoinette was beheaded at the guillotine during the Revolution (King Louis XVI died before her), her eight-year old son, Louis-Charles, was imprisoned in the Temple Tower, along with his older sister, Marie-Therese. Both children were imprisoned for two years and while Marie- Therese survived, Louis-Charles, the boy king, did not. Once his parents were dead, no one saw him but those of the revolution who brought his food. This secrecy gave rise to rumors that he had somehow escaped. His death at the age of ten prompted an autopsy. One of the attending doctors removed his heart and secreted it from the prison in his pocket. For two hundred years this heart had many remarkable journeys. As imposters, who claimed they were the boy-king, came and went, the heart survived into the twenty-first century when DNA testing would at last reveal to the world who the real Louis-Charles was.