What the dead know : learning about life as a New York City death investigator / Barbara Butcher.
Publisher: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2023Description: xi, 288 pages ; 24 cmISBN:- 9781982179380
- 614/.1092 B 23/eng/20230606
Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
600 - 699 | Hanover Public Library Shelves | BIOG 614.1 BUTC (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 31906001250779 |
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BIOG 610.92 HORT We are all perfectly fine : a memoir of love, medicine and healing / | BIOG 610.92 MASK Six months in Sudan : a young doctor in a war-torn village / | BIOG 610.92 ROED Deep water dream : a medical voyage of discovery in rural Northern Ontario / | BIOG 614.1 BUTC What the dead know : learning about life as a New York City death investigator / | BIOG 616.02774 SKLO The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks / | BIOG 616.07 DIMA Morgue : a life in death / | BIOG 616.398 THOR I do it with the lights on : and 10 more discoveries on the road to a blissfully shame-free life / |
Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism when she found an unexpected lifeline: a job at the Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City. The second woman ever hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhattan, she was the first to last more than three months. The work was gritty, demanding, morbid, and sometimes dangerous – she loved it.
Butcher (yes, that is her real name, and she has heard all the jokes) spent day in and day out investigating double homicides, gruesome suicides, and most heartbreaking of all, underage rape victims who had also been murdered. In What the Dead Know, she writes with the kind of New York attitude and bravado you might expect from decades in the field, investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, 680 of which were homicides. In the opening chapter, she describes how just from sheer luck of having her arm in cast, she avoided a boobytrapped suicide. Later in her career, she describes working the nation’s largest mass murder, the attack on 9/11, where she and her colleagues initially relied on family members’ descriptions to help distinguish among the 21,900 body parts of the victims.
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