American Sherlock : murder, forensics, and the birth of American CSI /
"From the acclaimed author of Death in the Air ("Not since Devil in the White City has a book told such a harrowing tale"--Douglas Preston) comes the riveting story of the birth of criminal investigation in the twentieth century"--
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
G. P. Putnam's Sons,
[2020]
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| Summary: | "From the acclaimed author of Death in the Air ("Not since Devil in the White City has a book told such a harrowing tale"--Douglas Preston) comes the riveting story of the birth of criminal investigation in the twentieth century"-- Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with beakers, microscopes, and hundreds upon hundreds of books sat Edward Oscar Heinrich, America's first forensic scientists. Working in a time when the turmoil of Prohibition led to sensationalized crime reporting and only a small, systematic study of evidence, Heinrich spearheaded the invention of a myriad of new forensic tools that police still use today, including blood spatter analysis, ballistics, lie-detector tests, and the use of fingerprints as courtroom evidence. Dawson captures the life of the man who pioneered the science our legal system now relies upon-- as well as the limits of those techniques and the very human experts who wield them. -- adapted from jacket |
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| Physical Description: | 325 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780525539551 0525539557 |