What the Dead Know

Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator

De: Barbara Butcher

Narrado por: Barbara Butcher

“Butcher chronicles her career path and her journey to sobriety in unflinching detail, while her voice remains deliberate and measured, occasionally slipping into what sounds like a half-smirk when cracking a joke….She has a way with words, telling stories that are at turns hilarious, thought-provoking and, as might be expected, disturbing….This is a story of trauma, yes, but it’s also a glimpse into the dark side of a city that most never see up close.” —The New York Times Book Review

Now featured in the five-part docuseries on Netflix, Homicide: New York

A “remarkably candid and sensitive” (The Wall Street Journal) memoir of more than twenty years of death-scene investigations by New York City death investigator Barbara Butcher.

Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism when she found an unexpected lifeline: a job at the Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City. The second woman ever hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhattan, she was the first to last more than three months. The work was gritty, demanding, morbid, and sometimes dangerous—and she loved it.

Butcher (yes, that’s her real name, and she has heard all the jokes) spent day in and day out investigating double homicides, gruesome suicides, and most heartbreaking of all, underage rape victims who had also been murdered. In What the Dead Know, she writes with the kind of New York attitude and bravado you might expect from decades in the field, investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, 680 of which were homicides. In the opening chapter, she describes how just from sheer luck of having her arm in a cast, she avoided a boobytrapped suicide. Later in her career, she describes working the nation’s largest mass murder, the attack on 9/11, where she and her colleagues initially relied on family members’ descriptions to help distinguish among the 21,900 body parts of the victims.

This is the “breathtakingly honest, compassionate, and raw” (Patricia Cornwell), “completely unputdownable” (Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Left Undone) real-life story of a woman who, in dealing with death every day, learned surprising lessons about life—and how some of those lessons saved her from becoming a statistic herself. Fans of Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, and true crime won’t be able to put this down.

©2023 Barbara Butcher (P)2023 Simon & Schuster Audio

Wonderful book

This book was much more than I expected. It’s heartfelt and sincere. The author is someone I would like to know.

Loved this!!!

Great memoir and great true crime. Barbara writes a deeply personal story about what it’s like for a professional woman to put yourself back together again and again. She lays it all out against a great backdrop of tough characters and gore. She did a good job bringing in humanity to forensics but if you love reading about good old fashioned nasty decomps you won’t be disappointed!

Loved it!! Didn’t want it to end!!

This was my first go-around on the subject matter, and author/narrator. I’m now seeking more of the same. Such compelling and interesting cases she had to work through. Loved the exposure to the details of the scenes, wounds and evidence. Also, she mixed in just the right amount of, who she was, and what effect the job had on her. The narration can ruin an otherwise well written book— not in this case; it was the ideal match for the story. Well done Ms. Butcher!

I like real, or so I thought.

Barbara is likable, real and
compelling. I wish she was my neighbor. Wonderful writer.

Stunning, literary achievement

One of those rare books that keeps getting better as it goes along. I hope they make a movie about this book. Maybe Oppenheimer will give the movie industry a belief that part five or 20 of fast and furious is getting old.

Very interesting

I don’t know why people are complaining about her talking about her life geezzz it’s not the whole book and to know her job you need to know a bit of her life.
It’s an interesting story she tells and I’m glad in listened.

Fascinating and well-presented

Not all memoirs should be read by their authors…but this one is terrific. Vulnerable but not sappy.

Wonderful story

This whole story was just wonderful about Barbara Butcher‘s life and working as a death investigator and everything that she has gone through in life very informative on a lot of things 

Extremely entertaining

This is a very interesting book. See for yourself. A very thought provoking thread read.

Easy listening and nice variety of stories.

Interesting to hear the investigator narrate this herself. She had a good mix of case stories including one from 9/11. Also a personal memoir type thing regarding her mental health struggles.