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What the Dead Know

Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator

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A "remarkably candid and sensitive" (The Wall Street Journal) true crime memoir from Barbara Butcher, a trailblazing New York City death investigator, who reveals the untold stories behind more than 5,500 death scenes, including the nation's most horrific tragedy: the 9/11 attacks.
When Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism, she found an unexpected lifeline in a job at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in NYC. As only the second woman ever hired for the role—and the first to last more than three months—she became a vital force in the world of forensic science and criminal investigations.

Over the next two decades, Butcher worked thousands of cases: gruesome homicides, suspicious suicides, heartbreaking scenes involving underage victims, and complex mass casualty investigations. In her unforgettable account, she invites readers into the gritty, high-stakes world of crime-scene investigation, from the autopsy room and morgue to tense moments at active crime scenes. Along the way, she uncovered how confronting death every day gave her a new perspective on life—and ultimately saved her from becoming a statistic herself.

In vivid, darkly humorous prose, Butcher recounts how she narrowly avoided a boobytrapped suicide scene, and how, during 9/11, she and her colleagues worked tirelessly to identify victims using scraps of clothing, DNA, and the memories of grieving loved ones. Her honesty, resilience, and sharp wit make this a standout in the genre of first responder memoirs and women in law enforcement.

"Breathtakingly honest, compassionate, and raw" (Patricia Cornwell) and "completely unputdownable" (Adriana Trigiani), What the Dead Know is a powerful, insider's look at the world of death and the lessons it teaches us about how to live. Fans of forensic memoirs, cold case investigations, true crime, Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, and TV series like CSI or Mindhunter won't be able to put this down.
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    The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.

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    A simple complexity publication with cover images and logos, converted to meet EPUB Accessibility specifications of WCAG-AA level. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for cover images and logos, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order, structural navigation, and semantic structure. Blank pages from print have been removed in this ebook, with related page number spans set on the first following in-spine page. Certain front and back matter pages have been adjusted in the reading order sequence from print, with related page references removed in the page-list order.

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    • The publication contains a conformance statement that it meets the EPUB Accessibility and WCAG 2 Level AA standard.

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  • English

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