Death as a Living

"Entertaining and thought-provoking, Burke blends vignettes from his time on the beat with deeply considered ideas on policing." —Newsweek

For more than 30 years, involving more than 1,000 cases, Doyle Burke has been a death investigator, first with the Dayton, Ohio police department, then with a county coroner’s office. In this book, he shares his tricks of the trade: how detectives solve cases, what they look for, the importance of forensic science, and the irreplaceable value of instinct.

Along the way, Burke offers humorous trial anecdotes, thoughts on race and policing, stories about the fatal toll stress took on fellow officers, and, perhaps most movingly, details about the three fatal shootings of police officers – one of them one of his first friends on the department, another the son of his sergeant – that he had to investigate.

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.