An engaging real-life story of forensic detection.
Schweit’s book offers a true-crime drama in which a team of investigators probes cold-case murders in Detroit.
The author, a former journalist and Chicago prosecutor who spent 20 years as an FBI agent, tells the story of Operation UNITED (Unknown Names Identified Through Exhumation and DNA), the largest coordinated exhumation of unidentified murder victims in Bureau history, spearheaded by FBI Special Agent Leslie Larsen and Detroit Police Det. Shannon Jones in 2019. They and the team they assembled (and met with at their unofficial headquarters at BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse in Livonia, Michigan) examined old case files and then worked to put names to people who were still nameless, using technology that wasn’t available at the time of the original crimes. “Through rain and mud, facing bureaucratic hurdles and limited resources,” Schweit writes, “these women meticulously unearthed and documented remains, collected DNA samples, and piece by piece, began solving decades-old homicides that many had long forgotten.” The book’s setting is largely a Detroit that’s still reeling, to this day, from the effects of the riots of 1967; in the years that followed, poverty exploded, homicide rates tripled, and property values plummeted. “Hundreds of vacant buildings were available for drug houses, prostitution rings, runaway flophouses, and gang activities,” the author notes. “It became easy to drop a body in a building, alley, or even on a street.”
It quickly becomes clear that Schweit has a truly compelling subject on her hands, and she writes about Operation UNITED with a fierce, bravura energy. Her work is both heavily detailed and intensely readable, whether she’s exploring the many lives that have been disrupted for decades by long-unsolved crimes or describing the graphic forensic details of the crimes themselves. For example, she engagingly examines the various stages of decomposition in Detroit’s waterways, where moisture, heat, and bacteria make tasks difficult, even for experts, and can turn fat on a dead body into a soap-like material called “grave wax”: “Doctors hunting for the clavicle or the tarsal bones,” she writes, “must squeeze out the toothpaste-like substance to see if they have found their pot of gold.” There’s also a heartbreaking amount of pain in these old cases, and Schweit shows respect for her readers by not shying away from any of it. She writes about families torn apart, about dreams destroyed, and about the many cases that involve infant homicides, with babies “battered by abusive caregivers, malnutrition, drug overdoses, or exposure during…long, cold winter nights in the northern city.” The sheer difficulty of using forensics, anthropology, and other disciplines to piece together victims’ lives underscores the intense dedication of the women who made this work their mission. At one point, Schweit writes of someone watching with “equal parts squeamishness and intrigue…as the team brings up long-buried body bags now filled with groundwater and a mix of bones and whatever might have been buried with the corpse.” Many readers may feel a similar combination of emotions—but they’ll also feel immense satisfaction in Schweit’s accounts of long-delayed justice. An engaging real-life story of forensic detection.Pub Date: May 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781947635791
Page Count: 220
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.
Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965
ISBN: 0375507906
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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