Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson: Death's Acre

Sit well downwind with this and don't read it over breakfast: Death's Acre, a sometimes graphic and pungent account of the world's only human-decomposition research institute, is not for the squeamish.

But fans of crime fiction with a forensic bent, such as Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta series or telly drama CSI, will find this fascinating.

Forensic anthropologist Dr Bill Bass takes a chatty, euphemism-free approach to this story of how he came to found the Anthropology Research Facility at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville — a piece of ground littered with decaying corpses better known as the Body Farm. Bass tells how he got hooked on forensics through a chance to accompany his university professor on a "human-identification mission", an experience which gave him a taste for solving mysteries using science.

Bass spent summers exhuming remains from a huge cemetery of the Native American Arikara tribe, before it was flooded by the damming of the Missouri River. It also helped cement his passion for the tales that dead people's bones can tell.

Dr Bass is a man who learns from his mistakes. Midway through his career he blundered. Asked to identify a body in a Civil War grave, Bass reported the time of death as only a few months. Much to his embarrassment — and to the delight of the press at the time and many a defence lawyer since — Bass was out by 112 years. The body was unusually well-preserved. Why?

Bass swallowed his humiliation and decided it was time someone researched human decomposition in a scientific manner. The Body Farm was born: "I would need to track death deep into its own territory, observe its feeding habits, chart its movements and timetables."

Bass has a strong sense of the dramatic and there are enough murder mysteries, crimes of passion and serial killers in this to satisfy the most hardened crime-fiction fan. Death's Acre is much more than bad smells and maggots, however. It offers a wealth of scientific and anatomical detail, with a couple of handy skeletal graphics which will have you knowing your sacrum from your cranium.

It is also a diverting account — Bass' enthusiasm is infectious, he isn't afraid to digress and mostly his anecdotes are worth the interruption in narrative flow.

There are a few gruesome shots among the small black-and-white photos, but the image which lingers is Bass' irrepressible, high-beam grin. Digging around decaying corpses in crime scenes and surviving the rigours of cross examination in court might be most people's idea of hell, but this is clearly a man who enjoys his work.

Penguin, $28