Dr Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson: Death's Acre

Reviewed by ROBIN ARTHUR


Should something so gruesome be so enjoyable?

Forensics is hot. The television show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation rates. Patricia Cornwell's novels sell. But Dr Bill Bass is the real deal. While this bone boffin claims he is less brilliant than the television supersleuths, he is a pioneer of modern forensics. His book proves the old saw that truth is often stranger than fiction.

For more than 40 years Bass has trained and then worked with many of the American forensic scientists and police investigators who now inspire the modern media fascination with solving crime through rigorous analysis of bones, skin, cells and bugs.

And he has made his own unique, awful contribution to the forensic disciplines. Twenty years ago he set up an open-air laboratory to study the extended effects of decomposition in corpses. He and many students at the University of Tennessee have studied really closely the intricacies of decay in more than 300 donated cadavers at what became known as "the Body Farm". That research, at the Death's Acre of the title, now regularly helps investigators with the vital task of fixing the most likely date of death.

This book is no morbid tract, however. As a university teacher and trainer for the FBI and other law-enforcers, Bass knows how to hold an audience as he tells a tale. With the help of journalist friend Jefferson, he has sifted through his own work and personal life as carefully as he would comb the ashes of an arson scene.

He pulls out fragments of evidence and pieces them together carefully to reveal stories of serial killers, mob hits, audacious insurance fraud and a shocking crematorium scandal. Yet his work has not made this scientist clinical or abstract, particularly as he reveals how untimely deaths have blighted his own life.

In the end, his work is testimony to the fact that while our bodies are little more than water, fat, carbon and calcium, the careful application of scientific methods may - where justice requires - allow the dead to speak for themselves.

Publisher: Time Warner

Price: $39.95