What The Dead Know: Learning About Life As A New York City Death Investigator, by Barbara Butcher

This book seems to have two missions, one of which it succeeds well at, and the other it fails at equally greatly. Yet since the first mission of the book takes up the vast majority of the content of this book, I tend to feel better about the book than I would feel if the two missions of the book were given equal billing. It should be noted that this book works as a discussion of what the dead tell us, and how people can use this information to help solve the mysteries of their death and come to grips with the sadness of their lives. This works extremely well also in pointing out the toll that trying to think of how the dead died and what message(s) are being sent by the remains of the dead as they are found takes on death investigators, as well as the flaws and foibles of hte people that the author worked with during her time as a death investigator. Where the book starts to fall apart is at the end, and that is largely due to the way that the author elides her experience as a manager and executive and the politics involved with that and her failures to engage diplomatically with others in positions of authority, and even glides too quickly over the offense of having looted the ruins of the Twin Towers for tchotchkes that she kept for years before half-heartedly trying to return them.

Besides this major structural weakness of trying to glide over some very uncomfortable aspects of her career, including some time spent as an inpatient in a mental hospital after being let go of her position, as well as her numerous failures as a leader within the bureaucracy of New York and her inability to handle the politics of such a position, where her explanations are lame and sketchy, the other major weakness of this book is perhaps one that cannot be helped in that the author is not very appealing or sympathetic as an author. She appears to have some major tendencies towards misandry that make this book less enjoyable for male readers than it ought to be. Not only does the author claim to have been a lesbian (though she obviously had enough interactions with men to end up with a daughter and to go out on dates in her twenties with men, including one that nearly ended up as a date rape, at least in her telling here), but she also seems to think that her struggles as an alcoholic make her more sympathetic than she is. She also tends to play up whatever sort of credit that she thinks herself and other women have for supposedly being better at death investigations because they have less of an ego, which is rather narcissistic of her, since she shows plenty of ego here that mars her supposed insights. So long as she sticks to talking about the dead and what they say, she does well enough, but when she starts talking about herself, it is hard to believe her very well.

In terms of its contents, this book has a bit more than 250 pages of content divided up into eighteen mostly thematic but sometimes chronological order. The author begins with a note before the first chapter details an angry hanging man who designed his suicide to kill others as well who came to take his body down (1). This is followed by the author’s discussion of how she fell into alcoholism and yet found luck as she recovered (2). This is followed by the author’s insights on how to roll a body (3) and the story of a murderous gay couple (4) and the author’s experience with the flophouse of the Whitehouse Hotel (5). The author spends time talking about things not to try at home (6), the timing of various signs of death that indicate when someone died (7), and the author’s struggle to understand young murderers (8). There is a chapter on the “other” city underground (9), as well as the author’s thoughts on what to do in case of emergency (10). There are chapters on the slain and slayers (11), some particularly gruesome discoveries (12), as well as the difference between homicides (13) and suicides (14). At this point the author changes gears to talk about September 11th (15), the author’s willingness to do whatever it takes to take charge of aspects of death investigation in New York City (16), the politics that ended her position (17), and how she did not deal with forced retirement very well (18). The book then ends with an epilogue and acknowledgements.