Rating:

Working in the Valley of the Shadow

Author: Barbara Butcher

Barbara Butcher (yes, real last name) is very intimate with all the forms a violent death can take, from a boobytrapped suicide to city-stopping mass murders. It is both a passion and, one could say, a deadly addiction that is taking a toll on her life.

Barbara forced her way into the old boy’s club the hard way: with grit and intelligence. She was only ever the second woman hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhatton. She was the first to last more than three months. During that time her stomach and her mind were tested, from sorting through over 20,000 body parts during the 9/11 clean-up, to identifying victims, to catching the one subtle clue in a suicide meant to take the finder with the dead man and stopping the horror mid-plot. But What the Dead Know isn’t technically a vignette of CSI like stories. Instead, it’s an intimate portrait of a woman’s life and the job she loves: the job that gives her so much while also corroding away her humanity and forbearance.

Image by Claudia from Pixabay

The story is told as a memoir, and honestly, we don’t spend as much time with individual cases and figuring out the who, what, where, when, and why as I would have liked. There is certainly some of that, including when a family brings a suspected homicide to Barbara and through their pushing, leads her to unveil the true MO. What the story is really about is how working with death, mistakes, and human evil takes a toll on a smart, determined woman who is, after all, only human. You can only see so much death before life takes on a grey tinge. But perhaps there is a ray of sunshine in the tombs – a perspective that helps Barbara ultimately save herself from the twin demons of addiction and depression.

What The Dead Know is a fast read. It’s compelling. We empathize immediately with Barbara. We root for her as time and time again her grit enables her to force her way into a male-dominated field and prove herself, beyond all doubts. We also deeply care for her and want to reach out during all those times when the bottle calls, when her functionality tips dangerously close to out-of-control-wreck, when she loses girlfriends and chances at happiness, when death starts to sing its own siren song.

This then is not so much the put-it-together clues of true crime narratives (think Ann Rule) but instead a deep, unflinching, honest sharing of a human soul who has walked through the valley of the shadow and still found a reason to go on. It’s at turns introspective, clever, funny, sad, and rakishly intelligent. A compelling, brutal glimpse into a necessary world that only a few can walk through and continue to survive. Recommended.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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