Old bones be cold bones

Dead Men Do Tell Tales
by William R. Maples, Ph.D.

Deliciously lovely stories of bones and teeth and tiny shards of metal that remain in the ground when the flesh has long gone.  Dr. Maples is a forensic anthropologist with a long and wild habit of turning tiny little things into evidence.  Or into people, as we learn from the time he spent worrying through boxes of Vietnam war remains.

Cremains is the term he uses for cremated remains, and he got an exceptional challenge in the Page-Jennings case, where a fire and explosion mixed four sets of human bones and a dog in the blasted out shack twenty miles north of Gainesville, Florida.  Does everything bad happen in Florida?  It was the setting for The White House Boys crimes and in my most recent reading, Tomatoland, the rape and murder of thousands of acres of animals and plants to grow foul-tasting tomatoes. Not to mention human slavery.

But if you're thinking about reading this book, just flip through the pictures in the middle inset to make up your mind.  You'll see airplane crash sites, Don Francisco Pizarro (executed conqueror of Peru), Tsar Nicholas II and his family, five murdered students, and much more. You'll read it.