Death's Acre : Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm-Where the Dead Do Tell Tales »

Dr. Bill Bass created the world's first and only laboratory devoted to the study of human decomposition: The Body Farm. Bass has written or co-written more than 200 scientific publications, many based on mysteries he helped solve.

Jon Jefferson is a veteran journalist, science writer, and documentary filmmaker. His productions have been broadcast on such networks as The History Channel, A&E, and the National Geographic Channel, and his articles have appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, and USA Today.

Dr. Bill Bass, one of the world's leading forensic anthropologists, gained international attention when he built a forensic lab like no other: The Body Farm. Now, this master scientist unlocks the gates of his lab to reveal his most intriguing cases-and to revisit the Lindbergh kidnapping and murder, fifty years after the fact.

This is a book for forensics purists: voyeuristic oddballs like myself who are only mildly intrigued by the details of the book's true-crime narratives, who skip ahead to the part where the forensics guys arrive with their Ziploc bags and delectably horrid puns. ("Bill, give me a hand," we hear a fingerprint expert at a crime scene say when he wants a corpse's severed hand.) The cases in Death's Acre seem to have been chosen not for the dramatic arcs of crime unfolding and justice served -- indeed, many chapters end in anticlimax -- but because they work well to illustrate the essentials of decomp science: timelines of decay, identifying burned or skeletal remains, forensic entomology. — Mary Roach