How to catch a crook

Reviewed: The Little Book of Forensics, The Price of Darkness

Reviewed: The Little Book of Forensics, The Price of Darkness

The Little Book of Forensics
By David Owen, Allen & Unwin, 143pp, $19.95
FORENSICS have become crime fiction's latest means of deconstructing Frankenstein, a new twist on the way real-life criminals read scientifically based writers to avoid being caught. As this book wittily demonstrates, not only do fabrics, saliva and fibres give the game away, so do email messages, mobile phone records and closed-circuit cameras. David Owen pithily investigates 50 notorious international crimes, focusing chapter by chapter on a different specialisation, from toxicology to firearms, forgery to DNA testing.

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The Price of Darkness
By Graham Hurley,
Orion, 252pp, $32.99
GRAHAM Hurley's Portsmouth police series featuring the hardworking but quietly prescient Detective-Inspector Joe Faraday and the canny, reprobate D.C. Winter, came to me late. Now I'm hooked. The eighth, The Price of Darkness, puts Hurley alongside Scotland's Ian Rankin as a British noir crafter of singularity in an overcrowded field of copycats. He does multiple storylines,, segueing between the damage-controlling Faraday and the manipulative, ethically blind Winter. Hurley has Winter go undercover, infiltrating a drug boss Bazza's inner circle, as two vicious murders alarm the British government and have the anti-terrorist bunch circling Faraday.