Deadhouse

All three deputy coroners share one trait: a compulsive curiosity. A good thing too, because any observation at a death scene can prove meaningful. A bag of groceries standing on a kitchen counter, the milk turning sour. A broken lamp lying on the carpet of an otherwise tidy living room. When they approach a corpse, the investigators consider everything. Is the victim face-up or down? How stiff are the limbs? Are the hands dirty or clean? By the time they bag the body and load it into the coroner's wagon, Tiffani, Ed, and Mike have often unearthed intimate details that are unknown even to the victim's family and friends.

The intrigues of investigating death help make up for the bad parts of the job. There are plenty of burdens?grief-stricken families, decomposed bodies, tangled local politics, and gore. And maybe worst of all, the ever-present reminder of mortality and human frailness.

Deadhouse also chronicles the evolution of the field, from early rituals performed over corpses found suspiciously dead to the controversial advent of modern forensic pathology. It explains how pathologists "read" bullet wounds and lacerations, how someone dies from a drug overdose, or a motorcycle crash, or a drowning, and how investigators uncover the clues that lead to the truth.