Book Review

All That Remains: A Life in Death by Sue Black

This book promised all the things my ghoulish little heart desires: dead bodies + science. I was hoping I’d learn more forensic details that I might use when crafting murder mysteries. But it’s not really a how-to for writers, or even specifically about forensic anatomy. It’s more like a memoir.

The book starts out quite slow, and I considered stopping because I hadn’t read anything else by the author and was disengaged in the minutiae of her life. She talks about developing a fascination for anatomy while working at a butcher shop as a teen, how it inspired her to study medicine, and how she became an anatomist in part because she despises mice and rats, which are essential to a lot of scientific research. (While the author is Scottish, the narrator of the audiobook has a neutral British accent, which was kind of disappointing because it would have added some charming Gaelic flavor had she been Scottish as well.) Sue Black goes to medical school, decides to become an anatomist, and talks about the first body she dissected. While unusual, these events are hardly compelling.

Then Black gets a call from a colleague who asks “what are you doing this weekend?” It’s not a pair of free concert tickets going begging he has in mind. She’s going to Kosovo, to help gather evidence and identify bodies for prosecution of war crimes. This, horrifyingly enough, is where the story starts to get compelling, because while many people go to medical school and enjoy studying the human body, very few people have this kind of on-the-ground experience in such a niche field as mass disaster crime scene investigation.

It wasn’t just the war horrors I found compelling (they are quite gruesome) but the logistics that ordinary people like me never consider. Like, if you move all the flood victims to the church, it’s harder to tell who they were because location is an important piece of information. She talks about how she used her influence to develop new training for the kind of people needed to respond to events like this, and how a textbook she was co-writing with a colleague on the skeletal growth of children made her the ideal person in the right place at the right time for a specific use for that knowledge.

If you’re the kind of person who loves gruesome true crime, and can get past the slow start, you’ll probably find something compelling about this memoir. I don’t advise reading it while eating though.




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