nonfiction photo collection: Sleeping Beauty II, Stanley B. Burns, MD

Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement, and the Family in Memorial Photography - American and European Traditions.
Stanley B. Burns, M.D. and Elizabeth A. Burns
ISBN: 9780961295837 (ISBN not in book)
Post-mortem memorial photography from America and Europe, from the earliest photographs to the 1980s.
Read July 14, 2016

Morbid, creepy, unsettling, and really really interesting.  And sad.  A record of people desperately grasping (and paying a vast quantity of money) for a final memento of a loved one who is irrevocably and perhaps unexpectedly and quickly gone from them forever. I'm curious to see the first book.

Nonfiction: Forensics, Val McDermid

Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and more tell us about crime.
Val McDermid
ISBN: 9780802123916
Nonfiction: lots of case histories, each detailing the use (or development) of a forensic technique.
Read June 2015

This was an EXCELLENT book.  I read it on vacation, and freaked out my co-vacationers, but it was a lovely read all about murders and killings and decapitations and mouldering bodies and bones and blood and decomposition and maggots and it was delightful all the way through.