A Life in Death

We have a fascination with crime – from our love affair with reality crime shows to our thirst for crime novels and true crime stories, we can’t seem to get enough. Does this make us warped in some way? Perhaps, but luckily for us, there are people who actually take this fascination and funnel it into a career that helps us catch the bad guys, identify the missing or dead and make sense of it all, from car accidents to airplane crashes to murder and natural disasters. This is not an easy read, but it is a fascinating one,. highly recommended

I absolutely loved this book, it is a fabulous insight into what goes on behind the scenes of murders and disasters that result in tragic loss of life. I found it gripping and very interesting. Very well written. A great book and I hope you write more.

The book was ok. I was hoping for more of "him" in the book but it was a lot of data and background for me.

Rating: ★★★★★

One-Sentence Summary: A cop’s life working in the field of Disaster Victim Identification

Review: This book is not for the fainthearted. There is a lot of talk of dead bodies and quite a bit of talk about dead bodies in conditions you never want to imagine a human being in.

However, it is also very interesting. If you ever want to satisfy your macabre curiosity as to how the police identify victims involved in a disaster without getting too much into the science, then this is the book for you. It never lets you forget the sensitivity and the human element of working in a field which deals with tragedy after tragedy.

Richard Venables is in a unique perspective to be able to deliver an account of how Disaster Victim Identification has progressed from the ’80s to now as he pretty much invented the process for the UK and worked on a multitude of national and international disasters from some horrific train crashes to the Asian Tsunami and the 7/7 London bombings. He manages to do so without his personal agenda and thoughts against the establishment, which naturally seeps out now and again, taking over the whole book.
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Richard Venables was a naive 19 year old when he started in the UK police force. By retirement he had become a disaster response expert after dealing with a large number of fatalities from air and rail disasters in the UK as well as mass fatalities overseas. Thailand’s Tsunami in 2004 where 230,000 people were killed was the greatest challenge for Richard and his team.
He tells an amusing story where as a new recruit he learned an important lesson. Called to make a welfare check on an elderly woman not sighted for several days he forced entry to her home. Her body was located in the upstairs bedroom and as he checked for a pulse she screamed. The valuable lesson was that looks can be deceiving.
In the early days and for quite a while after officers were expected to deal with dead bodies and just get on with the job without any of the coping mechanisms now in place. At one stage he even found himself picking up body parts while his wife was in hospital giving birth to their first child.
In order to put procedures in place to deal with future events he drew on his vast experience with mass fatalities. Processes were then refined as any flaws arose. He also points out advantages and disadvantages of DNA and viewing body for identification purposes which I assume are still important and relevant.
His years in the job showed him that death could be powerful yet at times serene and of the overwhelming grief involved. Through his eyes you will discover the savagery of some humans due to insanity, the trauma of discovering victim’s especially murdered ones and finding some relief in common grief and bonding. I found it very touching how he treated the dead with respect and wanted to spare the living from further stress.
I was left with a 100 images in my mind after finishing this fascinating read. I was also stunned at the logistics involved in mass fatalities. The human body has always been of great interest to me so the detail wasnt too graphic for me.

I found this a fascinating book. I have always had an interest in the death process ( 2 failed interviews for a funeral director led me down a different, less interesting path) although I have read about and researched the various aspects of death, I have never read anything regarding DVI. The author has done a wonderful job describing dreadful situations that no one should ever have to deal with and I can see why he was awarded the QPM. A difficult read but utterly fascinating. Well done!