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.

Author Biography

VAL McDERMID has published twenty-eight crime novels, which have sold millions of copies worldwide, been translated into sixteen languages and won multiple awards. Her series featuring criminal profiler Dr Tony Hill was the basis for the TV series The Wire in the Blood for ITV.WELLCOME COLLECTION is a free visitor destination that explores the connections between medicine, life and art. In 2012, its critically acclaimed programme of events and exhibitions welcomed over 490,000 visitors.