This memoir by Jack V Sturiano is perfect for fans of CSI and forensic science. It is full of haunting stories that stay with you. Not for the faint-hearted. One of the most haunting stories is how Americans buy guns, go to the grave of their loved ones, and then just kill themselves. It makes the job easy as the receipt is still in the box, but it is very sad.
Imagine working at the morgue for twenty-four years. Every corpse has a story. This is a first-hand account of the real world of forensic medicine. It’s not the book, radio or television version, which from Poe to Holmes to Morse is entertaining fiction, but very little to do with the reality that’s being presented in these memoirs of a forensic investigator who did the work for twenty-four years. Every one of these stories has at the core an actual event witnessed by the author. Nothing is made up. It presents an alternative to all the fiction that is a billion-dollar industry. The mood, tone and emotion are included in each narrative, for their power and each filtered through the sensibilities of the forensic investigator. After a couple of hundred suicides, the minute you walk through the door you can smell the bad ones. Something an old doctor once told me about diagnosing patients, “When you hear horses’ hoofs, don’t think Zebra’s”. Like little slices of life, this memoir is presented as a collection of short stories written in the style of O Henry, Ambrose Bierce and HL Mencken.