American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI Hardcover – 1 February 2020

From the acclaimed author of death in the air ("not since Devil in the White city has a book told such a harrowing tale"-douglass Preston) comes the riveting story of the birth of criminal investigation in the twentieth century. Berkeley, California, 1933. In a lab filled with curiosities-breakerss, microscopes, bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books-satt an investigator who would go on to crack at least two thousand cases in his forty-year career. Known as the "American Sherlock Holmes," Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of America's greatest first-forensicc scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence, and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural. Heinrich was one of the nation's first expert witnesses, working in a time when the turmoil of Prohibition led to sensationalism crime reporting and only a small, systematic study of evidence. However with his brilliance, and commanding presence in both the courtroom and at crime scenes, Heinrich spearheaded the invention of a myriad of new forensic tools that police still use today, including blood spatter analysis, Ballistics, lie-detectors tests, and the use of fingerprints as courtroom evidence. His work, though not without its serious-somee would say fatal-flawss, changed the course of American criminal investigation. Based on years of research and thousands of never-before-published primary source materials, American Sherlock captures the life of the man who pioneered the science our legal system now relies upon-ass well as the limits of those techniques and the very human experts who wield them.

Categories: Crime