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71 reviews for:
The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America's Coldest Cases
Deborah Halber
3.17 AVERAGE
71 reviews for:
The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America's Coldest Cases
Deborah Halber
3.17 AVERAGE
I received this book as a Goodreads First Read.
When I first read the description, I assumed it was a researched-based book on missing person cases: I was wrong.
The book was way more anecdotal than expected, and the stories jumped around too much - I found myself going back to remember what happened, or wanting to know what happened next, but not sure when I would know the answer. Although the book is very anecdotal, Ms. Halber is very passionate on the subject and it shows throughout the book.
I would recommend this book to someone who is interested in the topic, but looking to dip their toes in the pool rather than diving head first.
When I first read the description, I assumed it was a researched-based book on missing person cases: I was wrong.
The book was way more anecdotal than expected, and the stories jumped around too much - I found myself going back to remember what happened, or wanting to know what happened next, but not sure when I would know the answer. Although the book is very anecdotal, Ms. Halber is very passionate on the subject and it shows throughout the book.
I would recommend this book to someone who is interested in the topic, but looking to dip their toes in the pool rather than diving head first.
Difficult to follow the jumbled organization of this book. The stories of everyday “arm-chair” detectives solving cold cases could be really intriguing, but the author’s style didn’t hold my attention.
I loved this book. I’m someone that’s maybe a little too obsessed with true crime. I figured the people featured in this book were probably similar to me. Maybe the kind of people who started out watching a lot of Investigation Discovery in their spare time and it snowballed from there. That’s not the case. A lot of them began investigating because there was a local unsolved case that they couldn’t forget about. Some had family members or friends disappear and it pulled them into a labyrinth of other families and friends searching for people too. These sleuths are not really finding out the whodunit of cases. They’re instead solving bodies. They examine descriptions of unidentified bodies—some decades old—and match them up to missing persons reports. (This a simplistic description and doesn’t really convey the true scope of the hours of research and investigation they do.)
The book itself is a little jumpy and disjointed. There are a lot of people and a lot of unidentified bodies mentioned throughout and it would be hard to keep them straight anyway, but Halber has a tendency to make cosmic leaps through space and time without much warning. I got mightily frustrated at first (GIRL STAY ON TASK, PLZ) because it bounced around every 10 pages or so. Luckily Halber discovers the power of a cohesive narrative about halfway through and we became friends again.
Something this book drives home again and again is that there are an obscene amount of unidentified/unclaimed bodies in this country. Some are buried unceremoniously, some are reduced to bones shoved in a banker’s box in the back of a police station storage room. The estimated numbers in the book are mind-boggling. I can see why these armchair sleuths get sucked in. Don’t these people have someone, somewhere wondering where they went? They have to, right? It’s very sobering.
After reading this book, I looked up how many unidentified bodies have been found in Maryland since 2000. 15 women. 65 men. I clicked on a random woman, aged 25-27. She was assaulted. She had been dead for months when she was found. I hope someone finds out who she is. I hope her family gets to say goodbye.
And that’s why I’m glad Deborah Halber wrote this book. I hope these unsung detectives keep doing their good work. They deserve this recognition (and more) for all the years of research they do to try and bring people home to their loved ones.
The book itself is a little jumpy and disjointed. There are a lot of people and a lot of unidentified bodies mentioned throughout and it would be hard to keep them straight anyway, but Halber has a tendency to make cosmic leaps through space and time without much warning. I got mightily frustrated at first (GIRL STAY ON TASK, PLZ) because it bounced around every 10 pages or so. Luckily Halber discovers the power of a cohesive narrative about halfway through and we became friends again.
Something this book drives home again and again is that there are an obscene amount of unidentified/unclaimed bodies in this country. Some are buried unceremoniously, some are reduced to bones shoved in a banker’s box in the back of a police station storage room. The estimated numbers in the book are mind-boggling. I can see why these armchair sleuths get sucked in. Don’t these people have someone, somewhere wondering where they went? They have to, right? It’s very sobering.
After reading this book, I looked up how many unidentified bodies have been found in Maryland since 2000. 15 women. 65 men. I clicked on a random woman, aged 25-27. She was assaulted. She had been dead for months when she was found. I hope someone finds out who she is. I hope her family gets to say goodbye.
And that’s why I’m glad Deborah Halber wrote this book. I hope these unsung detectives keep doing their good work. They deserve this recognition (and more) for all the years of research they do to try and bring people home to their loved ones.
This book was amazing. It had me in it's grip from beginning to end, never actually straying into territory that would lose my interest. As someone who loves all those CSI and Bones-type shows, learning about this internet revolution in cold case solving was fascinating. The fact that people spend their free time searching for answers for distraught family members says something, I think, about people in the 20th and 21st century, when most people abhor what's "become of the world". A must read for any mystery or CSI enthusiast!
emotional
informative
mysterious
I had highly anticipated reading this for a long time. A friend and former work colleague and I had talked about our fascination with cold cases and how they are solved. I had figured I would recommend this to her once I finished it, but I can't do that. It just didn't hold my interest, and I fell asleep numerous times. Essentially, the book looks at how websites and amateur sleuths are working to solve cold cases whose solution hasn't been possible before the Internet. Parts of this were compelling. It's touching, after all, when families get closure after decades of wondering whatever happened to a loved one.
*Disclosure: I received this book from a Goodreads First Reads giveaway.*
1. This book jumps all over the place in terms of narration, and I'm not quite sure what type of book this is supposed to be. Is it an expose into the world of online cold case hunters, the ins and outs and the hidden drama behind the scenes? Is it an investigation into the "hidden crises" of unknown and missing people in the United States, and the problem trying to find them justice? Is it about the author solving a missing person case herself (more on this later)? There seems to be multiple narratives throughout this book, and none of them stick.
2. Multiple missing person cases are detailed as being solved in the book, but there are inconsistencies in how they are presented. Some cases are introduced and solved in two paragraphs; others take whole chapters; some are used to set up the background of the person that the author is interviewing at the moment; and in the case of Tent Girl, introduced in the beginning of the book in what looked to be the case that would tie everything together and with the investigation and solution lasting the whole book, only for the identity of Tent Girl be casually revealed two-thirds of the way through the book, almost as an aside. Tone was very inconsistent between the ways each case was handled by the author.
3. Unless I missed the reveal (which is possible, because the writing style is so odd), but the other main case in the book, that of the Lady of the Dunes, remained unsolved at the end of the book. There seems to be a mention of a couple of potential IDs for the body, but, again, the way the names of the bodies were revealed in the book made it really hard sometimes to figure out what had been written. An index at the back of the book to search for names would have been helpful.
4. Halber litters the book with personal observations of the people and places that she visits in her research, and almost all of them are off-putting and degrading in some fashion. There is an idea that comes out from reading this book that everything outside of New York or Boston is in some way inferior and not meant to be taken as seriously as it could be. From the description of the "troll woman" climbing hotel stairs to a forensic examiner that can (incredibly) dress in tailored suits, to multiple mentions of hillbillies and rednecks, these descriptions take away from what should be the main focus of the book: the dead bodies themselves.
5. There are two points in this book where the author states that she wishes she could solve a cold case, which makes me wonder if she went into this book thinking that a) there was nothing difficult about doing so, and that b) it was, or could be treated as, the same as playing a game. It makes me wonder if she ever took this book seriously.
6. This has nothing to do with the premise of the book, but as I was reading this I was coming up with the impression that, while this book was thoroughly researched, the author wasn't the best writer. And then she writes (on page 100) that "... The Who guitarist John Entwistle died of a cocaine-induced heart attack." And that one typo (Entwistle played bass) made me question how thorough her research really had been.
I was very happy to have won a copy of this book in a giveaway and was hoping it was as good as it looked. And while Deborah Halber seems to have done her homework in researching this topic, it comes across as very boring and dull, which is not something I would think I would say about a book that discusses solving cold cases. I think this book could have been done better as a series of newspaper articles or possibly a series of essays on a website. Halber has no sense for writing a narrative in book form, and I think some of the problems I had with this book would be solved with a re-write to include a more cohesive narrative.
1. This book jumps all over the place in terms of narration, and I'm not quite sure what type of book this is supposed to be. Is it an expose into the world of online cold case hunters, the ins and outs and the hidden drama behind the scenes? Is it an investigation into the "hidden crises" of unknown and missing people in the United States, and the problem trying to find them justice? Is it about the author solving a missing person case herself (more on this later)? There seems to be multiple narratives throughout this book, and none of them stick.
2. Multiple missing person cases are detailed as being solved in the book, but there are inconsistencies in how they are presented. Some cases are introduced and solved in two paragraphs; others take whole chapters; some are used to set up the background of the person that the author is interviewing at the moment; and in the case of Tent Girl, introduced in the beginning of the book in what looked to be the case that would tie everything together and with the investigation and solution lasting the whole book, only for the identity of Tent Girl be casually revealed two-thirds of the way through the book, almost as an aside. Tone was very inconsistent between the ways each case was handled by the author.
3. Unless I missed the reveal (which is possible, because the writing style is so odd), but the other main case in the book, that of the Lady of the Dunes, remained unsolved at the end of the book. There seems to be a mention of a couple of potential IDs for the body, but, again, the way the names of the bodies were revealed in the book made it really hard sometimes to figure out what had been written. An index at the back of the book to search for names would have been helpful.
4. Halber litters the book with personal observations of the people and places that she visits in her research, and almost all of them are off-putting and degrading in some fashion. There is an idea that comes out from reading this book that everything outside of New York or Boston is in some way inferior and not meant to be taken as seriously as it could be. From the description of the "troll woman" climbing hotel stairs to a forensic examiner that can (incredibly) dress in tailored suits, to multiple mentions of hillbillies and rednecks, these descriptions take away from what should be the main focus of the book: the dead bodies themselves.
5. There are two points in this book where the author states that she wishes she could solve a cold case, which makes me wonder if she went into this book thinking that a) there was nothing difficult about doing so, and that b) it was, or could be treated as, the same as playing a game. It makes me wonder if she ever took this book seriously.
6. This has nothing to do with the premise of the book, but as I was reading this I was coming up with the impression that, while this book was thoroughly researched, the author wasn't the best writer. And then she writes (on page 100) that "... The Who guitarist John Entwistle died of a cocaine-induced heart attack." And that one typo (Entwistle played bass) made me question how thorough her research really had been.
I was very happy to have won a copy of this book in a giveaway and was hoping it was as good as it looked. And while Deborah Halber seems to have done her homework in researching this topic, it comes across as very boring and dull, which is not something I would think I would say about a book that discusses solving cold cases. I think this book could have been done better as a series of newspaper articles or possibly a series of essays on a website. Halber has no sense for writing a narrative in book form, and I think some of the problems I had with this book would be solved with a re-write to include a more cohesive narrative.
Scattered and chatty. This is very little information filled with way too many descriptions of people’s physical appearances, added just for padding. The title is not representative of what’s in the book. Did not enjoy.