Happy Monday everyone- I hope you had a good weekend. Mine was full of sunshine, family, and time in the garden – lovely. I’m hoping for more sun this week, even though I will be spending a lot of time on the road. Because of this, I’ll be audio booking it this week.
First up is Forensics by Val McDermid
The dead talk. To the right listener, they tell us all about themselves: where they came from, how they lived, how they died – and who killed them. Forensic scientists can use a corpse, the scene of a crime or a single hair to unlock the secrets of the past and allow justice to be done.
Bestselling crime author Val McDermid will draw on interviews with top-level professionals to delve, in her own inimitable style, into the questions and mysteries that surround this fascinating science. How is evidence collected from a brutal crime scene? What happens at an autopsy? What techniques, from blood spatter and DNA analysis to entomology, do such experts use? How far can we trust forensic evidence?
Looking at famous murder cases, as well as investigations into the living – sexual assaults, missing persons, mistaken identity – she will lay bare the secrets of forensics from the courts of seventeenth-century Europe through Jack the Ripper to the cutting-edge science of the modern day.
I’ve heard good things about this and am looking forward to finding out just how realistic some of my favourite crime novels are.
I’m following it up with The Smell of Almonds by Camilla Lackberg, an author I’ve only recently discovered.
It’s less than a week until Christmas and policeman Martin Mohlin is begrudgingly accompanying his girlfriend to a family reunion on the tiny island of Valön outside of Fjällbacka. The connection to the mainland is cut off by a snowstorm and when the domineering patriarch Ruben collapses during Christmas dinner, Martin is forced to intervene. He soon establishes that Ruben was murdered and since they are completely isolated on the island, one of the family members must be murderer…
This is a novella so shouldn’t be too long.
In between time I’ll be finishing off Thomas Hardy from last week. What about you? What are you reading?
Emma
One Readers Thoughts 
Sunshine, family, and time in the garden sounds like a pretty perfect week to me! My main book right now is Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name.
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It was lovely. I hadn’t heard of your book so looked it up. Sounds really interesting. Had you read the first one?
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Good choices, I have the Forensics book and I need to read the last Camilla Lackberg soon.
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Thanks – though sadly I didn’t make it to either of them thanks to forgetting my headphones! Next week…
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