“Reading this memoir is like watching an episode of CSI with your dry, brassy best friend.”
What the Dead Know
Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator
Description
Now featured in the five-part docuseries on Netflix, Homicide: New York
A “remarkably candid and sensitive” (The Wall Street Journal) memoir of more than twenty years of death-scene investigations by New York City death investigator Barbara Butcher.
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—and she loved it.
Butcher (yes, that’s 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 a 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.
This is the “breathtakingly honest, compassionate, and raw” (Patricia Cornwell), “completely unputdownable” (Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Left Undone) real-life story of a woman who, in dealing with death every day, learned surprising lessons about life—and how some of those lessons saved her from becoming a statistic herself. Fans of Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, and true crime won’t be able to put this down.
Reviews
“Butcher’s remarkably candid and sensitive memoir reveals how she learned to navigate a heart-wrenching line of work and to overcome her own demons.”
"An unprecedented gutsy view of the Rue Morgue in New York City, told by one of its greatest characters. Barbara Butcher stares life and death in the face and doesn’t avert her gaze. She’s the real deal. Her stories and insights are breathtakingly honest, compassionate, and raw. What the Dead Know is impossible to put down. A must read, it's destined to be a classic."
“What the Dead Know is wise and deep and completely unputdownable. Barbara Butcher's memoir is about finding home within yourself. It’s fantastic."
