American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI

From the acclaimed author of Death in the Air ("Not since Devil in the White City has a book told such a harrowing tale"-Douglas Preston) comes the riveting story of the birth of criminal investigation in the twentieth century.
Berkeley, California, 1933.
In a lab filled with curiosities-beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books-sat 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-and first-forensic 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 sensationalized 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-detector tests, and the use of fingerprints as courtroom evidence.
His work, though not without its serious-some would say fatal-flaws, 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-as well as the limits of those techniques and the very human experts who wield them.