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Book Note: Keith Simpson, Forty Years of Murder

I read this book about 3-Dec-2003. This is the first time I've read this book. The book is copyright 1978. This note was last modified Thursday, 04-Dec-2003 15:45:43 PST.

This note does not contain major spoilers for the book.

 

Remember, non-fiction books don't contain spoilers by my rules.

Keith Simpson appears to have been one of the major forensic pathologists in the UK for 40 years, starting his career shortly before WWII and continuing into the 1970s. In that time he's worked on a lot of cases, and he gives us summaries of a few of the more interesting ones.

It's written for a popular audience, I never had the slightest trouble understanding what he was talking about.

It does worry me a bit that he never seems to have the slightest doubt of the propriety of the results he renders. He never seems to feel that later information rendered his initial reports suspect. He appears to never have any doubts or regrets. (He's quite careful to keep his reports and testimony to what the evidence actually supports though; which should help minize regrets.)

Anyway, there don't seem to be very many books of this sort around, and it's very nice to have found one. The copy I read traces back to Teresa Nielsen Hayden's library.


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David Dyer-Bennet