American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI
- ISBN-10
- 0525539573
- ISBN-13
- 9780525539575
- Series
- American Sherlock
- Category
- True Crime
- Pages
- 336
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2020-02-11
- Publisher
- Penguin
- Author
- Kate Winkler Dawson
Description
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 curiosities--beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books--sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least two thousand cases in his forty-year career. Known as the "American Sherlock Holmes," Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of America's greatest--and first--forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence, and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural. Heinrich was one of the nation's first expert witnesses, working in a time when the turmoil of Prohibition led to sensationalized crime reporting and only a small, systematic study of evidence. However with his brilliance, and commanding presence in both the courtroom and at crime scenes, 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. His work, though not without its serious--some would say fatal--flaws, changed the course of American criminal investigation. Based on years of research and thousands of never-before-published primary source materials, American Sherlock 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.
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Other editions
-
- 2021-02-16
- 336 pages
- Paperback
- Penguin
-
- 2020-08-06
- 336 pages
- Ebook
- Icon Books
-
- 2020-02-11
- 338 pages
- Paperback
- G.P. Putnam's Sons
-
- 2019-07-31
- 312 pages
- Paperback
- Rowman & Littlefield
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