Traces of Guilt: Forensic Science and the Fight Against Crime

From serial murders to financial fraud, from wartime atrocities to the international drug trade, it threatens the stability of society as never before. Increasingly, governments and police forces are turning to science for aid. Traces of Guilt examines how forensic science can help in the fight against crime and asks how effective and reliable it really is.Author Hugh Miller takes us from the hi-tech world of digital telephone fraud, where scientists struggle to identify the invisible perpetrators of million-dollar robberies on the information highway, to the hills of Guatemala, where forensic archaeologists attempt to discover the hidden secrets of a massacre as they exhume 24 mass graves. He traces a global trail of gruesome murders back to the world's first international serial killer and examines the case of the American on death row whose life hinges on whether he is deemed mad or bad.