“Lay Them to Rest: On the Road with the Cold Case Investigators Who Identify the Nameless” by Laurah Norton (5 stars)

I have to start off by saying that Laurah Norton is my new superhero! She is a “Writer and former academic with 15 years in the fields of literary fiction, creative nonfiction, and archival and primary research.Practiced podcast showrunner and host with experience in serial and single-episode formats. Work includes creation, writing, research, and hosting of podcasts One Strange Thing and The Fall Line” (Laurah Norton). She has collaborated on many of these projects with top-ranking scientists, artists, and forensic anthropologists.

Norton is clearly someone you want on your side. As she’s proven time-and-again with her dedication to representing the unidentified and nameless, Norton rarely takes no for an answer. In her book, she discusses that sometimes there’s grants or gifts to help pay for all the testing that goes into identifying remains. But sometimes it’s fundraising, personal money, or families of other missing people who help cover the costs. With all of that on the line, Norton and her team must feel a lot of pressure to succeed. It’s not always possible immediately, but like the reopened case of Jane Doe, in a few years, science will leap again and someone else will come along to try and solve it.

No one knows how or if science will be able to completely eradicate the problems facing police forces who are trying to solve cold cases such as this one, but there have been small steps forward throughout the years and Norton carries readers through each step delicately, but mightily. Since I had never really learned much about this field of forensics, I was worried the book would get wordy, hard to understand, or even too niche for my understanding. However, Norton keeps readers on track with her personal connections, keen observations, and simplistic explanations. Who better to explain forensics to us laypeople than a writer trying desperately to understand and communicate what her scientist friends are telling her?

This book was one of the best we’ve ever read for book club. Lay Them to Rest is “a true-crime book focused on forensic science, unidentified persons, and Laurah’s experience following the identification of a Jane-Doe homicide victim found in an Illinois state park in 1993” (Laurah Norton). Following along as Norton and her colleagues stop at nothing to find the identity of Jane Doe was amazing!

Plus there was so much information I’d never known anything about. Did you know GEDmatch was an open-source DNA site where you can upload your data profile to help law enforcement and others looking for DNA connections? How about taking a few hours to deep-dive into the NamUs database? There are people whose job it is to create mockups of possible portraits based on the remains of unidentified people. All of these bits and pieces go into hopefully solving just one case.

When discussing this book in the club, everyone agreed that it was an amazing learning experience outside of the usual serial killers, cults, and gore that we read. As an important part of criminology, forensics is one subject we had yet to cover. It led to discussions on how science may be able to improve in the future, why there are still so many missing and unidentified individuals, and how we as a small part of the crime community could help.

Overall, I gave this book five stars because it was well-researched, personal, engaging, and an amazing look into forensic science and anthropology. There’s always more that can be learned from asking the right questions and finding the right answers. If you’re at all curious about forensic anthropology, I’d suggest starting right here.