The Skeleton Crew

March 31, 2014
Though experts can’t settle on a figure—from 13,000 to 40,000—they agree that there are multitudes of unidentified remains in America, and it’s more than law enforcement can handle. That’s where the public comes in. Self-proclaimed Web sleuths have been identifying victims and investigating unsolved murders since 1999, according to journalist Halber. In her first book, she profiles individuals from this unique subset in a lively study that’s part whodunit, part sociological study. She introduces readers to Todd Matthews, one of the scene’s celebrities, who began investigating unsolved murders in his teens and has spent most of his adult life (to the detriment of his family) attempting to identify Kentucky’s “Tent Girl,” and founded one of the first sleuth websites. Readers also meet Betty Brown, a gifted sleuth who “can find anything” except for the remains of her own brother, as well as Cheri Nolan of the National Crime Information Center and coroner investigator Rick Jones. Using Matthews’s quest for the identity of the Tent Girl as a framing device, Halber shares the petty arguments, forensic techniques, and trivia (both New York and Philadelphia are built upon mass graves). The result is eminently entertaining and will be devoured by armchair detectives. Agent: Lindsay Edgecombe, Levine Greenberg.

August 1, 2014

Journalist Halber introduces readers to the unusual world of web sleuthing: in this case, crowdsourcing the task of comparing the thousands of reports of missing persons to those of unidentified remains in the hopes of finding a match and bringing closure to families searching for lost loved ones. The author paints a colorful picture of armchair investigators pursuing their first "solves" amid the conflicting motivations of their peers and of various law enforcement agencies--the infighting of the online missing-persons communities is effectively juxtaposed with the red tape and politics of real-world departments and policymakers. Perhaps unintentionally, Halber's decision to intermingle various cases and sprinkle the result with a large cast of characters evokes what one imagines is the same feeling a web sleuth gets hopping from one missing-persons report to another, looking for connections. The occasional bizarre similes don't overly detract from an intriguing invitation to help mitigate a "silent mass disaster" that few are even aware has happened. VERDICT Puzzle fans, true crime aficionados, and heavy users of Internet forums will appreciate Halber's shout-out to aspiring consulting detectives.--Ricardo Laskaris, York Univ. Lib., Toronto

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