True Crime Book Club (November)

Name: True Crime Book Club (November)
Start: 2024-11-22T17:30:00-06:00
Location: 14 S. Commercial Alley, Mason City, IA, United States, Iowa 50401

Schedule

Fri Nov 22 2024 at 05:30 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

14 S. Commercial Alley, Mason City, IA, United States, Iowa 50401 | Mason City, IA

Welcome to our newest book club, crime junkies! We'll meet every 4th Friday of the month at 5:30 pm to discuss con artists, dastardly deeds, and general menace. Our book for November book is What the Dead Know by Barbara Butcher. Copies are available to buy in the store now! You can also reserve yours online here: https://threebellsbooks.com/item/rPCoGQ_-yAX8A0yw8928VA
About the book:
Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism when she found an unexpected lifeline: a job at the Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City. The second woman ever hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhattan, she was the first to last more than three months. The work was gritty, demanding, morbid, and sometimes dangerous—and she loved it.

Butcher (yes, that’s her real name, and she has heard all the jokes) spent day in and day out investigating double homicides, gruesome suicides, and most heartbreaking of all, underage rape victims who had also been murdered. In What the Dead Know, she writes with the kind of New York attitude and bravado you might expect from decades in the field, investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, 680 of which were homicides. In the opening chapter, she describes how just from sheer luck of having her arm in a cast, she avoided a boobytrapped suicide. Later in her career, she describes working the nation’s largest mass murder, the attack on 9/11, where she and her colleagues initially relied on family members’ descriptions to help distinguish among the 21,900 body parts of the victims.

This is the “breathtakingly honest, compassionate, and raw” (Patricia Cornwell), “completely unputdownable” (Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Left Undone) real-life story of a woman who, in dealing with death every day, learned surprising lessons about life—and how some of those lessons saved her from becoming a statistic herself. Fans of Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, and true crime won’t be able to put this down.