An excellent book for true crime lovers. The usual dry chapters are replaced with personal stories and related events. Try this book and join Burke's fan club of true crime junkies.

Engaging and immersive. A recommended purchase for collections where true crime and mysteries are popular.

The author talks about his long career in law enforcement, mostly as. Homicide detective, in one of America’s most violent cities. The book is interesting and has a good narrative.

“But Death was Final, and I was already learning, it Wore You Down as an Investigator”

These are the words of Doyle Burke, who worked for the Dayton County Police Department for 30 years, most as a Homicide Detective, and investigated 1,000 cases.

This book takes you behind the Police Tape and offers a rare glimpse inside how Homicide work is really done. It is interesting to learn how using your experience, gut, science, and hard work go into trying to solve a homicide case. Most are solved and successfully prosecuted, but not all. It becomes obvious why this would take a toll on a person and be a highly stressful job.

Reading about different cases, I did like this. It gives you insight into how detective work actually happens and the kind of evidence that is needed to successfully prosecute a case. Some of the stories are quite gruesome, but no matter how the case happens it stays with the detective and worse the families and friends of a person whose life has been taken away in a violent matter.

Sadly, many cases are completely senseless. Doyle speaks of a case where a man shoots at 9 people, 5 of whom die. A young child, witnesses him killing his family. He must testify. The reason for all this is because of domestic violence. This is a very good example of why prior domestic violence incidents really need serious attention. Domestic Violence tends to escalate. The man has been living with his girlfriend and is furious she will not give him money to go and drink. He becomes outraged and starts shooting the entire family in the house. The level of anger and his horrific actions, just don’t make sense to most of us for this kind of argument. Yet, these types of incidents happen more frequently then it is easy to ever comprehend. Detectives know this and witness it and must then investigate these crimes, but it is senseless to them as well.

The author does a good job showcasing the difficulty of being a Homicide Detective. He talks about Dayton, Ohio and how it has changed since he grew up there. Many decent manufacturers jobs were lost and poverty crept in. So much so, that it was called the ‘Hillbilly Heroin Crisis’ and with drugs come danger and death. He talks about the divide between black people and white people and how that decided on which part of the town you lived in. He is sympathetic to many suffering, he holds each family in his heart, thinks about the victims, and really made me understand being a police officer better. He is honest about conflicts, too.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the tough and gritty world that a Homicide Detective encounters. True Crime fans will enjoy this book, it speaks of so many cases and tells how they were investigated. It is also a memoir from a man who spent his life working around death. There is insight learned doing this and there is a burden one carries forever.

Thank you NetGalley, Doyle Burke, and Ink Shares for granting me a copy of this book. I am always happen to share my opinion and leave a review.

Wow! This is an amazing inside look at the life of a homicide investigator. Burke takes you inside some of his most memorable cases while also explaining what being a homicide detective is really like and what it takes to get there. Some of these cases were brutal and he doesn’t spare details including information from autopsies and rigor mortis etc so this book may be triggering for some and may not be for you if you have a weak stomach. However, this book was so much more than just an overview of true crime cases. He discusses what it is really like to work in homicide. From the closeness that everyone shares from being in life and death situations to the heartbreak when an officer is killed in the line of duty to the humor that officers share to make it through being called away from their families on holidays. This book is a must read for any true crime fan and anyone who is interested in policing! Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This was a fantastic insight into homicide investigations where you not only get the facts of the cases, but also see the emotional side of things for those involved in the investigations and the ripple effect immediately as well as years later. You get a great insight into the cases talked about so you can really picture what's going on, picture the people involved including the victims and those trying to solve the case. There are some truly sad cases as well as ones that make you angry and there are also times you smile due to the comradery of the police involved (I especially loved the part about the Bosnian Investigators Enis and Samir ) as well as the never ending bond that can happen during someone's worst moments. An extremely well written book that makes me want to buy a paperback version to have on my shelf at home.

Doyle Burke is a veteran homicide investigator from Dayton, Ohio. After decades of service with the Dayton PD, he became an investigator for the county coroner’s office. This book serves as his memoir, but is also a police procedural and also shares details from a vast collection of the cases he was involved in over the course of his career.

My one and only real criticism of this book is the disparity between how the book is marketed, what is stated in the synopsis and then the disclaimer at the very start of the book. I was drawn in to this book by the description listed on NetGalley. Seems so interesting, right? But then on the page where publishing information is contained, there is also a disclaimer that states “this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.” This was an unsettling foot to get off on, but I dove in anyway.

The book contains all the gory case details and forensic science a lover of true crime craves. There was also a fair amount of legalities explained; the ins and outs of a criminal court proceeding, necessities for strong cases and where it can all fall apart. Personally, I also appreciated the point of view that police and detectives are still just people, going to work everyday and doing their best as flawed human beings.

Being a bit of a true crime junkie, I am already familiar with forensic procedures such as blood spatter analysis, stages of decomposition, use of stomach contents to predict time of death and gun shot residue. That said, for the average person, all of these details would be very interesting and educational as they were well laid out and explained in terms not overly technical or confusing. For anyone newly interested in crime investigations, this book is a gold mine of information.

Overall, I thought this was a very well written book. The chapters weren’t too long, the writing was smooth and easy to read. The pacing was perfect to keep the memoir rolling along. This was a really enjoyable book that I would recommend to anyone with a new found interest in true crime and police procedure. 3.5/5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley, Inkshares Publishing and authors Doyle Burke and Lou Grieco for this free eARC to read in exchange for an honest review.

"Part memoir, part police procedural, and part true crime anthology, Death as a Living reveals the inside world of homicide and death investigation—the triumph, tragedy, humor, and truly bizarre situations one finds when working that beat." (Goodreads synopsis) - And this was exactly what this book was about!

This true crime book focuses on Burke's police career with Dayton PD for almost thirty years with the last twenty-two years as a homicide detective. I liked that he shared a brief history and socioeconomic of Dayton in the book. This definitely gives me a better understanding of the place. The cases he had worked on were interesting and I am not familiar with most of them. Some cases were hard to read.

I loved that the author shared what a police work/career entails - starting from his days as a patrol officer (during the tough midnight shifts), and how he worked his ways up from patrol to property crime squads to violent crimes and finally the homicide squad.

The police procedural part was super interesting for me especially the forensics part!

I think the part that I will remember for a long time was how this profession affects and affected the personal life of a police officer - both mentally and emotionally. It was not easy and definitely heart-wrenching to read.

Overall, this was an entertaining, insightful and well-written true crime book! I enjoyed it and recommend it to all true crime fans!

Pub. Date: Dec 21st, 2021

***Thank you Inkshares, authors and NetGalley for this gifted review copy. All opinions expressed are my own.***

When I review for NetGalley, I'm reviewing for librarians. I'm thinking, 'do I need to buy this for my collection? Will my patrons read this?' Oh, heck yeah!
Burke paints an unflinchingly vivid portrait of the gruesome work of a homicide detective. Still, this book is an easy read--fascinating and educational. Life advice: "Never have your girlfriend with you right after you kill your wife." Burke teaches us how to dress like a homicide detective and how to walk the walk & talk the talk. At the same time, it never feels like he's overacting for us or exaggerating. I learned a ton of lingo reading this book. I feel like DRT may be my new go-to response (Dead Right There). I watch a ton of true crime documentaries but "mud vein" was new and then there are the all-important factors with any crime: COD, MOD, and TOD.
Highly recommended for true crime fans and police procedural (fiction) fans who want to read about the real thing. Also, not bad as a reference for crime writers.

This is an absolutely fascinating insight into the life of an American Police Homicide Detective in the 80s and 90s. As you can imagine with death and mortality as the main subject matter there are many difficult to read parts which will never leave me. As a civilan, this really gave me an understanding of what happens when someone dies and the multiple cogs and wheels that start turning and how the simplest clue can lead to a suspect being identified and charged. I would really recommend this book but would also caution that it is not for the faint hearted and deals with very tough and hard subject matters.

This book was amazing and everything of the sort. I will definitely be reading more from this author.

This book felt extremely unorganized. The narrative felt clunky- a better editing would have helped.

Doyle Burke and Lou Grieco’s new book, Death as a Living: Investigating Murder in America’s Heartland (Inkshares 2021) is a complex text that is part memoir, part police procedural, and part geographical history set in the unlikely location of Dayton, Ohio.

The text recounts key episodes in the life of homicide detective Doyle Burke. Burke’s career, spanning from the late 1970s into the mid-2000s, is chock-full of fascinating criminal cases. As the investigator of over 1000 murder cases in a very complicated city full of geographical and social complexities that do not often make for easy investigating, Burke takes the reader on a tour through some of the most memorable events in his career. However, throughout the text Burke also intersperses his own perspective on race and policing, stress, and trauma in relation to policing, as well as some of the deaths that shaped his career.

This book is a very complicated one. Fundamentally, this text has some issues related to perspective and voice that felt disconnected from my own. The memoir has obviously been written in response to the anti-police sentiment that has taken hold culturally as people in the United States and around the world protest police-involved deaths, especially the deaths of black citizens. These protests have led to important calls to defund the police in order to remove some of the power they hold due to the often systemic and deeply ingrained racially motivated biases many police departments exhibit. These calls for defunding are rooted in a desire to redistribute and question power and who holds it, especially in a country where violent and deadly weapons often become the first resort in any given conflict.

Burke’s response to these issues is tone deaf, to say the least. While he raises valid issues around the complexity of race relations at the microcosmic level, and while there are undoubtedly valid conversations to be had around the degree to which trauma effects police officers, Burke spends no time interrogating why these traumas and inequities are allowed to proliferate and what systems allow this cycle to occur. Burke’s perspective is very much one of “a few bad apples” rather than a deeply flawed and centuries-long systemic problem that values certain lives over others under a capitalist policing system. In other words, it seems that, in Burke’s quest to value the work of police officers, he misses the entire point of what “defund the police” actually means. He makes no effort to question the system that he is ingrained in, and that is a massive problem in this text. There are many moments where Burke’s misapprehension is clear in the text, and it is a dangerous precedent to set in a true crime text, especially in one dealing with the perspective of a law enforcement officer. This book had the potential to be well-executed. The reflections of a 30-year homicide detective in a city with its own very nuanced history of race relations has the potential to be interesting if read in the right context, but this book misses that point in a big way.

This is not to say that this book has no hope as a true crime text, although I would argue that it is certainly hopeless if it aims to ingratiate itself into a “hall of fame” of current true crime that addresses these systemic problems. Burke has many interesting stories to tell, and he is clearly invested in his home city and works hard in the narrative to paint a picture for the reader against which these stories are set. Burke has encountered some truly bizarre and tragic cases in his years as a detective, and I was entertained. However, when Burke began to moralize in the wrong direction, I was lost. I deeply wish this had been a text with a different tone altogether, as I’m not sure it is worth reading, despite how interesting the stories he tells are. A book like this—with such an overtly responsive tone—cannot help but miss the mark.

Please add Death as a Living to your Goodreads shelf.

Don’t forget to follow True Crime Index on Twitter and please visit our Goodreads for updates on what we’re reading! You can find Rachel on her personal @RachelMFriars or on Goodreads @Rachel Friars.

About the Writer:

Rachel M. Friars (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She holds a BA and an MA in English Literature with a focus on neo-Victorianism and adaptations of Jane Eyre. Her current work centers on neo-Victorianism and nineteenth-century lesbian literature and history, with secondary research interests in life writing, historical fiction, true crime, popular culture, and the Gothic. Her academic writing has been published with Palgrave Macmillan and in The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies. She is a reviewer for The Lesbrary, the co-creator of True Crime Index, and an Associate Editor and Social Media Coordinator for PopMeC Research Collective. Rachel is co-editor-in-chief of the international literary journal, The Lamp, and regularly publishes her own short fiction and poetry. Find her on Twitter and Goodreads.

A digital copy of this book was graciously provided to True Crime Index from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

although i don't love true crime podcasts, i really love true crime books, ones that go deep into detail and always seem to have more compassion for the victims

this was interesting as it takes place in dayton, ohio, middle america, a place i'd never heard of. doyle burke was a homicide detective in the city for over twenty years and i wasn't expecting the amount of range i got from the various murders

like i said, the victims are treated with respect and compassion and burke covers so many topics

As a criminologist and deep seated member of the true crime community, I’m no stranger to true crime stories. It is rare to find a story that isn’t just about one case though. While this book was a bit dry for my liking, it was good nonetheless.

These days the police get a lot of bad press. It's true, there are some dirty cops out there who do terrible things. But the truth is, the vast majority of law enforcement professionals are fine, upstanding people. who put their lives on the line to protect and serve their communities. They don't do it for fame or fortune or status, because more often than not when they interact with people it's on the worst day of that person's life and they don't get much positive feedback for the work they do, even under the best of circumstances. Police work is a calling, much like the clergy. It's not glamorous and you won't get rich doing it, but the intrinsic rewards call people to the profession and the people who do it are all in.

The press and social media thrive on negativity. Making people feel good doesn't cause them to rise up, it doesn't translate into public outcry, which doesn't result in advertising dollars or viral headlines. No, the media wants you to be angry so they'll only tell you the bad things. They'll dig until they find something really awful and then they'll build a context around it that may or may not be accurate and sell it to you as though it was the every day state of life in our country. The media did the same thing in the 1800's and early 1900's to perpetuate racist stereotypes and we managed to eventually recognize that as hate speech and condemn it. But we haven't gotten to that point yet for police officers. We allow the media to paint the entire profession with broad strokes and we allow our culture to perpetuate hatred for perfectly decent people just because of the uniform they wear.

Burke's book opens the lid on the police. What are they really like? What struggles do they face trying to protect the people in their jurisdictions? Why do they do what they do, the way they do it? How does their work effect them? Their families? Most of us, having never served in this capacity, know little or nothing about police work or the police life (though a lot of people think they do because they watch cable television). Burke educates us on what really happens behind the scenes. I found the whole thing fascinating and enlightening and also very sad. I did internet searches on many of the cases Burke discusses in the book because I was interested to know more about the victims and the investigations. I encourage anyone to look up Jorge Del Rio, a young officer who reached out to comfort Burke during a difficult case despite the fact that they barely knew one another. Fast forward almost 30 years to Del Rio being gunned down trying to serve a warrant, leaving his wife a widow and his five daughters without a father. A lifetime of public service cut tragically short, a wonderful man gone, a blind widow who lost her best friend, five young women who will never again get to hear their dad say "I love you." But the media didn't care about Jorge. Think about that for a minute.

I really enjoyed reading this book and I think it's bigger than simply an interesting account of one man's career. Burke talks about community policing, forming relationships with the leaders of the community to build understanding and trust so the police and the citizens can work together to ensure the best possible outcomes for everyone. This book is a broader form of that same concept. He's communicating with the readers to help build the same type of understanding so maybe the next time they interact with a police officer they'll think back to this book and know the police officer they're interacting with is not some monster with a badge, but a person just like you and I. A person who deals with the worst humanity can dish out and has to go home and try to forget the horrors they've seen, a person who puts their life on the line every day, both physically and emotionally, to protect their community.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.

I think the most surprising thing about this book was the amount of violent crime in Dayton, Ohio. Aside from this and the microwaved infant there wasn’t much of note in this book. While I did enjoy it, it just wasn’t much to write home about.

Really cool book! Originally had to DNF due to having no time to read it but I'm so glad I picked it back up. As a forensic science student, it was really great to see the investigative side of true crime that I don't always get to see. It was great to see the anecdotal side on top of the procedural side as well as receive advice about trusting your instincts and other important lessons. It was also interesting to see the more emotional side of Burke as well. I definitely recommend this to anyone interested in true crime stories.

This was my first true crime book and I think I picked a good one. An Ohio detective for many years writes about his experiences throughout his career and I enjoyed it overall. With many jobs throughout his career from homicide to even the county coroners office. I liked the background of the cases more and his overall take.

I enjoyed this read. It kept my attention and I really found myself connecting with the characters. Make sure you read this one!