No narrative breaks between many of the stories, and sometimes the details were confusing for me even as an adult. However, my students loved it! And it was surprisingly comprehensive for a YA treatment. ( )

Strangely enough, and I say strangely because honestly I don't read a lot of this kind of non-fiction, this was a very enjoyable and interesting book.

Mostly because the author had an engaging voice throughout that had me alternately chuckling at the foibles and follies of forensic work and surprised that certain people inspired other literary notables. ( )

Read for #bookriot #readharder #1 a young adult nonfiction novel. And for #mmd #4 a novel by a local author.

I liked this. The pacing was fast, a little too fast actually. Lots of good examples and good writing plus a solid historical to the present evaluation of forensic techniques. I wish she had delved into the science more, maybe less crime examples so you could dig in a little more. Although may be very appropriate for a young adult. ( )

In reviewing this book, I wish to focus mostly on accessibility. In this regard, this book does a poor job of living up to accessibility standards. The cover is very inviting, promising the reader some intriguing information about the gruesome subject of forensic science. After all, doesn't everyone love a good gory story about the underbelly of human behavior? A quick look at television ratings can answer that question fairly definitively. Anyway, the book fails to deliver effectively on the subject of accessibility based on several factors. Though there is a table of contents, the chapters are not organized or separated by narratives leading to a reader finding an interesting photo or caption and then hunting, often for a long time, for where the narrative supporting this picture begins. The chapters do offer fun figurative titles but that is about it as they don't really expound on this with what I like to call "flavor text." The book has a decent glossary but the words of the glossary are not in bold print or indicated in any way in the narrative so that the reader has no clue that the words are defined later in the book. There is no pronunciation guide given so, if you don't already understand how to say the word, you are just out of luck which begs the question of why a glossary is included at all. There are no sidebars. The inserts between chapters are indistinguishable from the rest of the narrative other than their pages are black with stripes around the border. The bibliography is divided into primary and secondary sources but, most of the sources are long URLs that would be almost impossible to type in manually and so unless you are buying this as an eBook are almost useless in further research. In a book titled "Blood, Bullets and Bones" as morbid as it may sound, one would expect to find photos or drawings of everything in the title. However, there is almost no blood, no bullets and only one instance of bones shown. The photos are usually stock photos of criminals or the investigators who caught them with the occasional victim thrown in. Overall using several metrics to evaluate the bibliography, photos, and captions as well as the index , sidebars or lack thereof and notes, this book falls far short of the mark. For a book that promises an exotic delicacy dish of the wild and the weird in human behavior, the reader is delivered instead, a gas station microwave sandwich of the mundane and semi interesting that is loaded with artificial ingredients. ( )

This book was interesting. Went through the various forensic methods used throughout history, their discovery and popularity today. The author gave historical examples of crimes and how the forensics of the day were used, sometimes erroneously. ( )