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Traces - Review

 

Synopsis:
In Traces, Professor Patricia Wiltshire will take you on a journey through the fascinating edgeland where nature and crime are intertwined. 

She'll take you searching for bodies of loved ones - through woodlands, along hedgerows, field-edges, and through plantations - solving time since death, and disposal of remains, from ditches to living rooms. She will give you glimpses of her own history: her loves, her losses, and the narrow little valley in Wales where she first woke up to the wonders of the natural world. Pat will show you how her work with a microscope reveals tell-tale traces of the world around us, and how these have taken suspects of the darkest criminal activities to court.

From flowers, fungi, tree trunks to car pedals, walking boots, carpets, and corpses' hair, Traces is a fascinating, unique, and utterly compelling book on life, death, and one's indelible link with nature.

Review:

Unfortunately I found this book incredibly boring - too much pollen and not enough emotion. I found myself skimming through the words to find anything of interest.

One of the main issues is that Wiltshire is too detached from the stories for you to have any interest in them yourself, they are simply viewed as nothing more than bodies teeming with spores. The book is also very repetitive and Wiltshire frequently comes across as arrogant and judgemental to today’ generation, and this doesn’t help you to get into the book.

The novel itself is a jumbled mix of fairly dull stories interspersed with tales from the author’s life that never seem to lead anywhere or get at anything meaningful. There were a few interesting bits of information but nothing that made dragging myself through this book for five days worth it. If if a little more time had been spent trying to link a constant thread through this book then it may have read a lot better.

Traces may be informative for someone interested in how pollen is involved in crime scenes, but unfortunately it was just not for me, which was disappointing as I love forensic science, I just didn’t expect it to be so centred around pollen and spores.

Rating: 3/10


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