Drowned in the Desert. Several weeks ago, I posted an entry about research on using the analysis of vapors from decomposing corpses to establish the time since demise. I mentioned the counterclaims of the forensic entomologists that their accuracy in establishing time of death needed no improving upon. Here’s a review of the memoir by preeminent forensic entomologist Lee Goff.

It is a fine

thing, rare in fiction and not so common even in

non-fiction, to read an account of how an expert applies his

talent. It is the nearest thing to magic in the real world, and

not to be despised merely because Goff’s skill lies in a

place where people prefer not to look: where maggots feed

on the flesh of dead people.

As a founding father of the modern science of

forensic entomology, Goff is most often called on to

determine the time of death of a murder victim, and his

accuracy can awe…I was glad

there were no photographs in the book, only tasteful line

drawings of insects. Beetles, ants, wasps, flies, mites and a

centipede all parade in Goff’s bestiary, but it is maggots

which rock his world.

…A forensic

entomologist was baffled by the unusual size of some of

the maggots on the corpse of a 20-year-old woman found

stabbed to death by a logging road. It turned out that the

big maggots, which had grown more than twice as fast as

they should have done, had been feeding from the victim’s

nose, which was suffused with cocaine from years of drug

abuse.

By the way, Goff’s major research methodology involves murdering scores of pigs each year and planting them in the wild to study their decomposition under various circumstances. London Review of Books