The Skeleton Crew, Deborah Halber
The Skeleton Crew, Deborah Halber
List: $17.99 | Sale: $12.59
Club: $8.99

The Skeleton Crew
How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America's Coldest Cases

Author: Deborah Halber

Narrator: Laural Merlington

Unabridged: 10 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/01/2014


Synopsis

The Skeleton Crew provides an entree into the gritty and tumultuous world of Sherlock Holmes–wannabes who race to beat out law enforcement—and one another—at matching missing persons with unidentified remains.

In America today, upwards of forty thousand people are dead and unaccounted for. These murder, suicide, and accident victims, separated from their names, are being adopted by the bizarre online world of amateur sleuths.

The Web sleuths pore over facial reconstructions and other online clues as they vie to solve cold cases and tally up personal scorecards of dead bodies. The Skeleton Crew delves into the macabre underside of the Internet, the fleeting nature of identity, and how even the most ordinary citizen with a laptop and a knack for puzzles can reinvent herself as a Web sleuth.

About Deborah Halber

Deborah Halber started out as a daily newspaper reporter, then turned to the dark side to do public relations. She worked as a writer and editor for Tufts and as a science writer for MIT, where she chronicled everything from quantum weirdness (that's the technical term) to snail slime. A freelance journalist since 2004, her writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, MIT Technology Review, the graphic news magazine Symbolia, and many university publications. A member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the National Association of Science Writers, Deborah lives near Boston in a house with a lot of former pets buried out back.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Grace on July 26, 2014

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. I was greatly intrigued by the premise. I love true crime shows, books, etc. I some times surf the web looking for new crimes, missing people, and unidentified remains myself (now I am not as serious as the people in this book). I was looking forwar......more

Goodreads review by Suzie on June 05, 2016

I read a lot of nonfiction, so I know what I like. This should have been a 4 or 5 star read for me, but because the author (and possibly the editor) appears to be ADHD, it came very close to getting 1 star. The book is a mess of disconnected stories. For instance, after relating the story of how one......more