The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America's Coldest Cases

by Deborah Halber

Solving cold cases from the comfort of your living room…

The Skeleton Crew provides an entree into the gritty and tumultuous world of Sherlock Holmes – wannabes who race to beat out law enforcement - and one another - at matching missing persons with unidentified remains.

In America today, upwards of forty thousand people are dead and unaccounted for. These murder, suicide, and accident victims, separated from their names, are being adopted by the bizarre online world of amateur sleuths.

It’s DIY CSI.

The web sleuths pore over facial reconstructions (a sort of Facebook for the dead), and other online clues as they vie to solve cold cases, and tally up personal scorecards of dead bodies. The Skeleton Crew delves into the macabre underside of the Internet, the fleeting nature of identity, and how even the most ordinary citizen with a laptop, and a knack for puzzles, can reinvent herself as a web sleuth.

Genres: Nonfiction, True Crime, Crime, Mystery, Science, Audiobook, History

285 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2014

About the author

Deborah Halber started out as a daily newspaper reporter, then turned to the dark side to do public relations. She worked as a writer and editor for Tufts and as a science writer for MIT, where she chronicled everything from quantum weirdness (that's the technical term) to snail slime. A freelance journalist since 2004, her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, MIT Technology Review, the graphic news magazine Symbolia, and many university publications. A member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the National Association of Science Writers, she lives near Boston in a house with a lot of former pets buried out back.

Reviews

[Stacee · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really excited about this book, but it was a bit of a hot mess.

Instead of facts, it was stories. I would have been okay with stories if they would have been engaging. Instead, I found myself getting confused at the timeline because there was so much jumping around.

I love the idea of people who aren't law enforcement tackling cold cases. They're doing an excellent service for the loved ones who have missing family members. I just wish it could have been presented in a different format.

**Huge thanks to Simon & Schuster and Edelweiss for providing the arc in exchange for an honest review**

[Jyanx]

Could have been a really interesting book, but it was hampered by the choppy, and disorganized format, and the author's tendency to drop really interesting plot points to focus on mundane details. Please don't tell me more about the murder case please let me know exactly what all of these amateur sleuths look like, and what they were wearing when they met you.

[Grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. I was greatly intrigued by the premise. I love true crime shows, books, etc. I some times surf the web looking for new crimes, missing people, and unidentified remains myself (now I am not as serious as the people in this book). I was looking forward to reading this book and even made sure to clear my schedule for a few hours so I could get down to business.

Sadly this book did not live up to my expectations. While the cases were intriguing and the people interviewed in the book were interesting, the book itself was so poorly laid out, the chronological order was so choppy, that it really detracting from reading and paying attention to the narrative.

The authoress jumps from one person to another, from one crime to another, from one website/chat room to another just to circle around and refer to the first crime/person/web site in the middle of talking about a completely different crime, etc. It was obnoxious and really subtracted from a book that could have been top notch.

[Laurel · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book had a great premise: how "regular people" are using the internet to identify murder victims, or "cold cases" that remain, some decades later, unsolved by professionals in the field of criminal investigation.

I had great difficulty reading this book, and think that it could have used a good editor. There is great detail in the stories shared in this book- too much perhaps. It is very difficult to follow the large cast of characters, some that are followed throughout the book, and others who only appear on a page or two. The author was not consistent in using first, last or nicknames, which made this read very confusing and frustrating. Many times I thought I should create my own list of characters and roles they played in each case, but did not have the time. It was not that important to me, as I was yearning to simply finish this book. And we still don't know the identity of "The Lady of the Dunes".

[Audrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a low 3 stars. I’m sure the editor made a lot of improvements, but it needed a second editor. I imagine the first editor’s brain started melting after some time with this book.

The book isn’t entirely sure what it wants to be. Sometimes it’s about crimes, and sometimes it’s about the people who solve crimes.

There are a lot of unidentified bodies and remains out there, sitting in morgues and police station basements. Many of them are missed by their families. Often just having a body dumped in the next county or state is enough to prevent identification. The book highlights the problems with databases like NCIC.

The book mainly focuses on “armchair detectives” who scour the Internet, hunting clues to identify Jane and John Does across the country. The parts about how they look for clue.s was really interesting. But the author goes into excruciating, unnecessary detail at time about meeting these people, what they look like, and long descriptions about the scenery on the way to visit these people. Her descriptions are not exactly flattering. (She’d never make it as a model, she was so fat. Ha ha! Wow, wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley! Ha ha.) I wanted to take a big red pen and cross out all this stuff. It was so unnecessary.



Internet sleuths have a tenuous relationship with law enforcement; there’s a fine line between giving helpful tips and coming across as a wacko. There are divisions within the sleuthing community that mostly center on that issue. A lot of these people live in rural areas with day jobs that aren’t mentally challenging. But they’re smart, so sleuthing is an addictive mental hobby for them. Some have a real Gift and are able to recognize decomposed remains as the same person in a photo. A lot of them are also into genealogical research.

The author will constantly switch back and forth between describing a case (somebody disappearing) and following clues to identify unknown remains. Some cases are spread out over many chapters. With all the names thrown out, it was difficult to remember a case and the involved people that she came back to many pages later.

For a really good book, it should have focused on one case per chapter and cut out all the descriptions of people and places that had nothing to do with the cases. It was interesting when the author actually stayed on topic.

I don’t remember any swearing | No sexual content | Some descriptions of murders and decomposing bodies may be disturbing.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

The subject matter of Deborah Halber's The skeleton crew : how amateur sleuths are solving America's coldest cases promised to make for an interesting read. I have always been a fan of cold case stories, both fact and fiction. Halber relates the quest to unearth identities of the remains of the unidentified, who might be thought missing but really are not any longer. It's a small distinction but a very important one.

Unlike many of the reviewers here I was not put off by the stories that were told. This is just as I expected. I wanted to get to know the who, the where, the when, and the why of their non-identity. That lay people with the use of the internet and other means would be so dedicated to give these bodies, bones, or even less a name and bring closure to families is fascinating and commendable. Some of the case studies go back as much as 50 years. To see the changes in forensics, and crime solving methods over time is also interesting. The numbers of professionals and volunteers trying to solve identity is amazing. Rather than all working towards a common goal politics and cyberbullying often rear their ugly heads. Thank heavens there were enough people willing to set ego aside to make a difference.

I did find the construction of Halber's book, the jumping around from story to story confusing. In the end I was able to sort these out but a more linear format might have been easier to follow.

I plan to browse some of the websites that have been constructed to identify the numbers of people that are still nameless. It sounds hard to believe that this can happen but it does. What is even more unimaginable is just how many cases go unidentified.

This is the kind of book that should send one on to further research or inquiry. I might begin by visiting Deborah Halber's Website

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

*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.

[Katelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A family member brought this book home from the library, and when I saw all the negative GR reviews, I thought -- Nah. But the book kept calling to me from the shelf. So I gave it a try and got hooked.

There are some grisly descriptions, which was fine. But the bigger purpose was to portray the problem of unidentified bodies, and how ordinary citizens can try to help law enforcement match the bodies with missing persons, sometimes decades later. The volunteers do this work at their computers out of compassion and, for some, the fun of sleuthing.

I perused the website with the data. Very interesting!

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting topic-- I particularly liked the story of how the Tent Girl (real name Barbara Ann Hackman) was identified by an amateur sleuth with a Tent Girl website in 1998 (the body was found in 1968, three decades earlier).

But, as others said, it's pretty disorganized. It had a lot more potential than it actually lived up to.

[kris · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are anywhere between 13,000 and an estimated 60,000 unidentified bodies in American cemeteries, mortuaries, or coroner offices today. And the lists of missing persons are impossible to summarize. Unfortunately, it's clear that there's some overlap between the two groups and with the internet as a tool, citizens took it upon themselves to try to solve the question of who can be named.

The Skeleton Crew deals with this new wave of crime-fighting: regular Joes and Janes from across the world who log on to various databases of missing person descriptions and the evidence collected from unidentified remains, and they try to find a match. Some of them are looking for their own missing family; some are merely interested in 'solving' the puzzle. And a few of them have made confirmed matches, tipping off police of missing person files that may match their J. Does.

I had a few problems with this book, the largest by far being the hyper-focus on the citizen brigade, discussing their backgrounds and marriages and in-fights like a gossip columnist. And while there may be some merit in shining a light on the personalities that choose to do this numbing, hard work: this book wasn't it because:

1. I, like many of its readers I suspect, wanted to actually dive into the solved cases. I wanted to know the process used to match a name and an unsolved case. I wanted to see these stories told in a way that connected the similarities between them, making a case for the "skeleton crew". But because the book talks about infighting and describes houses and pets and spouses, it undermines the minds behind the solves even while sharing their successes. It exploits both sides of a person, and it leaves the final conclusion an unanswered question: should these people be allowed to solve our cold cases? And if not them, then who?

2. The flow of the book is absolutely a disaster. Many chapters felt like someone had taken pages of the manuscript and threw them in the air before publishing. The flipflopping between events was distracting and detrimental to the building of a cohesive portrait.

3. Many of the author's accounts upon meeting the skeleton crew were extremely off-putting. Everyone is a dirty hoarder, apparently, collecting something (photos, animals, vehicles) obsessively. Physical descriptions are plentiful: A woman is described as a "troll"; a former forensic anthropologist in Kentucky who likes suits is "easily [mistaken ...] for an attorney or a real estate broker instead of someone who routinely plunged her hands into corpses." The "famed" Dr. Marcella Fierro is summarized as "a short, round woman in a shapeless navy-blue pants suit, sensible black shoes, and metal-framed eyeglasses". The author includes pettiness, visions, and other demeaning tidbits about all her subjects without showing any true sympathy for her cast. Nor much for the victims, either. They're merely a means to an end, the detritus that comes with results.

4. The lack of acknowledgement of race was another issue for me: while not explicitly stated, it's apparent that Halber deals with white people trying to solve missing white people cases. Race is used only to remind readers that some of these people grew up in "racist" America: places where a person "didn't encounter blacks until [they] were eight years old". Or it's an identifier: was the body black, or white? It isn't a part of the discussion at all.

5. For all its dealing with murders and death, the most disturbing part of the entire book was this bit:

A disheveled kitten mewed feebly from a box on the kitchen table. "Come on," Halleck said, poking a bit of shredded meat at its mouth. "Take it." The kitten didn't respond to the food; its head lolled alarmingly to the side.

Later, Halber refers to the kitten as "doomed" and I'm still a little sick.

[Kara · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was one of the worst books I've ever read. While the information about the online sleuthing community was interesting, her writing is atrocious. How this jumbled mess of a book got published, I have no idea. It's like it didn't have an editor and this was the first draft. I had to force myself to read the second half of the book because she jumped around so much that I lost track of who she was talking about. She included a bunch of superfluous descriptions and a bunch of cringe-worthy similes that had no relevance to the topic and were really off-putting.

Also, in my opinion, she talked about people like a pompous jerk. She continually insinuated that people from the country or small towns are somehow less intelligent, even though these are the people who are dedicating their free time to finding closure for families of the missing. There's describing people, and there's being disrespectful. These people took time out of their lives to help this arrogant woman write a book, and she talked about them like they were just country bumpkins with nothing better to do. She literally refers to someone as a troll. Super disappointed and I hope if she ever decides to write another book, she takes a writing class and learns how to treat people like human beings.

[Suzie Quint · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read a lot of nonfiction, so I know what I like. This should have been a 4 or 5 star read for me, but because the author (and possibly the editor) appears to be ADHD, it came very close to getting 1 star. The book is a mess of disconnected stories. For instance, after relating the story of how one amateur matched an unidentified body to a missing person, the author makes the statement about how their second success didn't go so easily. It was a nice provocative lead in to the amateur's next experience. Except it wasn't. The author went off in another direction. If she ever came back to that second experience, I missed the connection. Which wasn't hard to do since there were a lot of names to remember and the author didn't give strong clues about how the pieces fit together.

This is the author's only book (she's a journalist) and I must say that it doesn't break my heart. This is a great topic, but the treatment is awful.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the cold cases themselves, but the profiles of the amateurs -- and their infighting -- not so much. Narration was a good fit for the book; however, given the lack of structure the print edition would be easier to follow (skim).

[Sophy H · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 stars and that's being generous!

Read all the negative reviews of this book and they all say the exact same thing, which is the same thing I'm gonna say........ Deborah Halber seriously needs to develop a relationship with an editor and she needs to learn the word chronological!!! The stories in this book jump round more than a bunch of fleas at a feral dog party!! We leap from one person to another, from the 1960's to the 1980's to the 1990's, we jump from one part of the US to another.

Honestly, my head felt battered by the end of reading this, and due to the utterly shit writing style, I ended up not caring at all about any of the cases!! Wow, good job Halber!! (Not, I'm being ironic!)

What could have been an amazing book on a very interesting subject matter ended up being ground into dirt.

A really poor show.

[Leo · Rating 2 out of 5]

The topic is very interesting, everyday people solving cold cases that professionals couldn't solve. A premise that could easily have been 4-5 stars. But I didn't like the way book was written, it was to messy and to all over the place and not very readable.

[Lori L (She Treads Softly) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America's Coldest Cases by Deborah Halber is a very highly recommended, fascinating anecdotal look at how amateurs are solving cold cases.

Chances are you know of a cold case, an unsolved murder right in your own city. Startlingly, according to what Halber discovered, chances are also "good that you or someone you know has at one point stumbled over a dead body. There are shockingly large numbers of them out there. According to the national institute of Justice, America is home to tens of thousands of unidentified human remains, with four thousand more turning up every year: intrepid adventurers or athletes who left their IDs at home; victims of accidents and mass disasters; suicides; undocumented immigrants; the homeless; runaway teenagers; victims of serial killers; and those who cast off a former identity, changed names, and left no forwarding address." Location 159

These cases are often given "mournful monikers" from the communities in which their bodies were found and become known as the "Tent Girl, Somerton man, Princess Doe, Saltair Sally, the Boy in the Box, the Belle in the Well, the Lady Who Danced Herself to Death." I can think of several unsolved cases where I currently live and know of others from various other communities I've lived in over the years. The number of unsolved cases is shocking. It is easy to see why law enforcement officials don't prioritize these unsolved cases when there are so many other crimes that can be solved.

While amateur detectives did try to solve some of these cases over the years, often searching for a missing relative, the age of the internet has dramatically changed their success rate. Now these same amateurs have access to much more information and they often have the time and desire to solve these cold cases. It becomes a rather macabre hobby where members have created online communities based on providing information on the cold cases and virtually compete with each other to try to solve them.

"By 2001, the same unidentified corpses that were once almost universally ignored had evolved into tantalizing clues in a massive, global version of Concentration played around the clock by a hodgepodge of self-styled amateur sleuths, a dedicated skeleton crew that shared a desire to match faces to names—and names to dead bodies. Anybody with an idealistic bent, a lot of time, and a strong stomach could sign on: a stay-at-home mom in New York, a chain store cashier in Mississippi, a nurse in Nebraska, a retired cop and his exotic-dancer girlfriend in Houston." Location 376

Halber actually looks at some of these cold cases and the legends that have sprung up around them. Intertwined in the stories about the cold cases is information about the amateurs who are spending vast amounts of personal time trying to solve them. As these online communities share tips and information on discussion boards like Cold Cases and the Doe Network, they can also get overly competitive and combative with each other. Even so, many law enforcement officials are benefiting from their skills at solving these very cold cases.

Halber writes in a very conversational, anecdotal, personal style that, after glancing at other reviews, I'm guessing you either like or don't like. I happened to enjoy The Skeleton Crew a lot and part of that enjoyment was in Halber's treatment of the topic. I found The Skeleton Crew highly entertaining. She's a great writer and, much like the cold cases she's discussing and her amateurs are trying to solve, sometimes the trail to the solution takes a few meanders before you find the identity of the deceased.


Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Simon & Schuster for review purposes.

Contents:
Prologue: The Well Driller
The Ultimate Identity Crisis
You Can Disappear Here
It’s the Ethernet, my Dear Watson
Ghost Girls
Bring out Your Dead
Inside Reefer
The Perks of Being Ornery
Seekers of Lost Souls
How to make a John Doe
Finding Bobbie Ann
Quackie is Dead
The Head in the Bucket
The Hippie and the Lawman
The oldest Unsolved Case in Massachusetts
Relief, Sadness, Success
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Endnotes

[Sara · Rating 1 out of 5]

Started but had to give it up by page 30. Author had no sense of timing and plotting - it's nonfiction, but if you introduce a cold case on page 1, and on page 23 you state which barely-introduced character solved it, it's hard to believe your pacing is going to improve sufficiently in the next 150 pages to make this a bearable experience. Occasional copyediting errors, twisted sentence structure, and unnecessarily in-depth descriptions capped it for me.

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fascinating subject handled poorly. The narratives & timelines jump around way too much - making it very hard to keep details straight. Also the author throws so many clauses into a sentence that it's a hard read even at that basic level.

[Lynda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't publishers edit books anymore? Annecdotal and poorly organized, this book was a hot mess.
There was interesting information buried there, but it was not worth the time I spent finding it.

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was so looking forward to reading this. Fascinating concept with good, real stories, but the writing is a mess. This book is in *desperate* need of an editor. There is no flow or way to make sense of the content. I found this a frustrating read and would not recommend.

[Jaclyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a true crime addict. I used to watch TruTV nonstop, back when it used to air a bunch of nonfiction crime shows instead of scripted reality tv, and now I watch Investigation Discovery incessantly. I was so excited about this book because it sounded so intriguing, plus I thought I could get some tips on how I could possibly become a "web sleuth" and help identify missing persons and unidentified remains.

While this book was interesting and definitely shared a lot of different true crime and missing persons stories, it wasn't as good as I was expecting it to be. It was instead a little confusing, frustrating, and hard to follow. The author not only jumps around chronologically with the cases, but she also jumps around with how she got involved in this endeavor and the various people she met and interviewed along the way. It just made for a confusing story overall. It was hard to keep track of who was who, because she jumped from person to person and case to case. It was also frustrating because I would get invested in one missing person case or web sleuth, but then she'd jump to another person or case before I got all the details I wanted from the first one. If or when the author would then jump back to a previous person or case, I couldn't remember any of the details because so much other info had been covered in the meantime, so I had to flip back through multiple pages to try to remember who or what we were talking about.

For instance, the author would start talking about a person and perhaps a case that person was involved in. While starting to talk about them, she'll mention another person and sidetrack to explain them, before backtracking to explain something else, and then sidetracking again, before eventually jumping back to the "first" story, or sometimes before jumping into something else entirely.

I guess I wanted this book to be more straightforward and linear. I was hoping to learn, perhaps, how the author became aware of this situation and started her research, and maybe that the book would follow her through her research as she interviewed various people. Or, I wish she would have focused on a couple people or cases as a time and told us about them and how they solved these cold cases. I didn't expect that the author would just jump around and first mention a particular case before jumping to this amateur detective and then starting explaining about a relative of that person before suddenly explaining about statistics of unidentified bodies and then abruptly going back to the cold case that was mention eons ago. All of this made it hard for me to really sink into the book because I couldn't keep any of the people, timeframes, or cases straight and I would start to get interested in something or someone before being jolted out of that topic and into another. I did feel the last few chapters of the book were a little easier to follow, as they seemed more focused on just one or two cases or people, and it didn't seem as all-over-the-place as the rest of the book.

Overall, this was a really interesting book with a lot of true crime tidbits. Unfortunately, I can't give it more than 3 stars because the way the book was organized was very confusing and frustrating at times. Regardless, still worth a read for anyone interested in the topic. A good book, but not great.

[Celia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe this book is intended for the summer beach crowd; for nonfiction it is very light read. It relies a lot on stories and anecdotes rather than statistics. The book jumps from subject to subject and time period from time period without any logical connection.

The “Skeleton Crew” are amateurs who go through the web trying to match missing persons to unidentified bodies. This matching of unidentified remains to missing persons aids the police in catching the killers and brings closure to the relatives of the missing persons. Despite what one sees on television, forensics is more of an art than a science. Humans are more successful and matching missing persons to unidentified remains than computers because forensic evidence is not clear cut. Forensics in many ways is more like an art then a science. Computers can’t pick up when the forensics is wrong and aren't good at matching sketches to actual human faces.

The book persuaded me that these amateur detectives are quite useful to law enforcement though they are not always liked by the police. Volunteers have the skills the computers don’t have and the time that law enforcement does not have in reviewing records of missing persons and unidentified bodies.

However, the book does have some flaws. It is not clearly organized and it took me awhile to understand the subject. The story jumps from one topic to another with no apparent rhyme or reason. I found the chronologically unclear and I was confused about the different web sites used by the “skeleton crew”. The book goes from one cold case to another without first finishing one.

I would be more critical of the book's organization if I did not learn so much from the book. Despite its organizational problems, the book was able to convey some important information to me. Before I read this book I did not realize that even with modern science it is still hard to identify a body. There are many unidentified bodies is this country. When I was reading the book, I heard about the number of unidentified remains there were from the September 11 World Trade Center. I don't remember what the figure was but it was very high which truly surprised me considering that families and friends would most likely know that the unidentified persons where in the area during September 11.

I liked the in the book the ordinary person has something to contribute to the expert and how the web was being used to gather information. It is also nice to know that humans still have skills that computers don't have.

[Yibbie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is one of the hardest books to follow I have ever read. I stuck it out hoping to learn about how missing and unidentified people are located and identified, but I didn’t, not really. The actual, information dealing with those topics would have made an interesting article. The history of the groups that have been started to assist law enforcement would have made another. Beyond those few widely scattered bits, there were a few things that made most of this book annoying.
First, it was so hard to follow. We are introduced to so many people from all around the nation and from so many different years that, even with the best organization, it would be hard to keep track of who was who, and who was looking for who. But in this book, it is even harder. She chose to follow multiple storylines simultaneously but didn’t give us any real clues when she was going to switch between them.
Second, there are so many extraneous details. It just didn’t help the story to describe how every person she meets is dressed, does their hair, what car they drive, how they decorate their house, their political persuasion, and their entire life story.
Third, the condescension was extremely grating. Intentionally or unintentionally, the author gave the impression that everything rural, conservative, religious, poor, or southern was somehow beneath her.
Fourth, I thought it was a little odd that despite the interaction necessary between the amateurs and law enforcement, there was very little input from the latter. It is mentioned frequently that at first, they didn’t always want the public’s help, but the reasons are never really explained.
Content warning,
Parts are very gruesome.
There are also several curse words.

[Suzanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was in dire need of an editor who could put it in some sort of order that made sense. The text jumps around so much that it is near impossible to follow the text without notes or flipping back to previous chapter. Why the author didn't just make each chapter one case is beyond me. By the time I got to the end, I couldn't make sense of which cases had been solved, who did the solving, what drama was occurring in the background of all this, or even remember the names of half the people involved. But if you're a focused reader, I think that the book still has some merit.

An interesting thing about the book is that it not only talks about the victims, but also the intricacies of the online presence that attempts to identify them. Again, this isn't very well laid out, and is confusing, but I think that it was interesting to read about it anyway.

Overall, if you are the type of person who likes to know the intricacies of groups like websleuths, then I think this book is for you. I don't think that this book lends itself well to people who are solely interested in true crime, however, because the crimes in this book are secondary and unsolved.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating look into another whole subculture of mostly internet forums where ordinary citizens match Missing Persons with Unidentified Persons, thus managing to solve cold cases. Many seemed unsolvable and were up to 30 years old.

Did you know there may be between 40,000 and 60,000 Unidentified Persons laying around morgues, forensic labs, bones or ashes piled up in cardboard or metal boxes or buried in Potter's Fields at any given time across America? Did you know that up until 9/11 there was no Federal/National effort to collaborate the Missing Person's Data with the Unidentified Data??

This is where the Skeleton Crew came in and made the efforts themselves, on their own time, often for years, frequently without any help from the medico legal or justice system. These people are like the unsung hero's of our time, finding and uniting the Unidentified Dead with their families that were left to wonder what happened to their loved ones for year upon year.

[Elena · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was curious to read this book because the idea sounded great. I got it and read the first few chapters. It seemed a bit choppy with several different stories woven together, but I was going to give it a go. Well then I put it down for a couple of days and had a few night shifts. When I tried to pick it back up, I had no clue what was going on in the book. I think the author was trying to somehow make the stories more intriguing by only giving the reader bits at a time. But for me, it just made it too confusing to follow to the point of me not even finishing the book. It's a shame because amateur crime solving sounded very interesting!

[Tracey · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was bad. Just bad.
Where was an editor?
Why did the author chose this subject if she was queasy about dead people?
Why doesn't the narrator know how to pronounce Whitey Bulger?
The only reason I could finish this was because it was an audio book and I was stuck in a car for a while. This subject deserved so much more. Such a shame.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating look into a side of crime solving that doesn't get a lot of notice in the media. I appreciated how the author tied the narratives of various victims and amateur detectives together and showed how much work goes into identifying even one person. Highly recommended!

[Valerie Anne]

Read to page 68. Interesting, just not the book I was looking for. Taking it back to library.