American Sherlock

Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI

By: Kate Winkler Dawson

Narrated by: Kate Winkler Dawson

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.

Interesting story and individual, terrible speaker

This story is utterly fascinating, but I just can't bear the reader, whose delivery is slow, ponderous, and full of the oddest pauses and stops. I'll have to read this one myself.

I love Kate Winkler Dawson

This book was fascinating. I was amazed at the accomplishments of Oscar Heinrich and that he was able to discover this methods during the 1920s and 30! I thought the author did a great job reading the book.

The author is always the best narrator…

I love author-narrated books. No one, save the author, knows the nuance and inflection in which the book was written. There are few voice actors that truly do a book justice. This book reads like a novel. It’s smooth, educational, and fact-paced. The research is impeccable.

Very interesting.

History and forensics. I learned a lot about the science of forensics and the gentleman who worked hard for the truth according to the evidence.

Great science.

Well done. A little wordy but very good. Her voice is clear and easy to listen to.