The Education of a Coroner: Lessons in Investigating Death

Macabre tales from a county coroner color Bateson’s latest. Bateson met Ken Holmes in 2010 while writing The Final Leap: Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. At that time, Holmes was nearing the end of his third and final term as coroner for Marin County, Calif. His 36 years on the death beat in one of the most affluent counties in the United States supply the grim stranger-than-fiction stories in this book. He recalls the teenager who convinced her boyfriend to help kill her parents and burn their bodies in a remote campsite cistern, and a 42-year-old woman who jumped to her death from the Golden Gate Bridge and washed up on shore with a gunshot wound to the head. Holmes investigated the deaths of famous porn kings and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, and he was the man San Quentin State Prison officials called when inmates died. Bateson, who opted not to interview any of Holmes’s colleagues for the book, recounts these macabre tales with a novelist’s flair, punctuated by Holmes’s insight. Additionally, Bateson reveals the art and science of a forensic investigation, from the initial call to the autopsy room. Bateson’s retellings of Holmes’s stories are entertaining and provocative. (Aug.)