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The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America’s Coldest Cases (2014)

by Deborah Halber(Favorite Author)

3.1 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1451657587 (ISBN13: 9781451657586)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Simon & Schuster

review 1: Essentially this book is about people who use the internet in an attempt to solve murder cases which have grown cold over the years; often nameless bodies are discovered throughout the country leaving investigators stymied. Over time, individuals have honed their searching skills on the net and joined with other "sleuths" to form websites dedicated to identifying such victims. The author interviews and hangs out with a number of these people and writes about their techniques, dedication, conflicts (between members of the various groups) and actual cases. She calls attention to the large number of murder victims who have never been identified ("tens of thousands") and reports on the sporadic success of these people and the continuing government efforts to step-up and improv... moree databases that track and describe the "unidentified dead". She describes the details of the murder cases included in the book nicely but jumps around too much making the reading confusing; the start of the book is particularly disjointed. I think the author would be better off if she picked one or two interesting murder cases and just wrote about them.
review 2: What a fascinating book. It starts with the discovery of a girl wrapped in a canvas tent in Kentucky with no clue as to her identity, and follows this, and several other cases of unidentified bodies. If you like the CSI TV series, you will like this read. Cold cases that languish for years are someone's mother, father, brother, sister... This book is about the amateur sleuths who try to solve the puzzles. less

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