Review: "Unnatural Causes" by Dr Richard Shepherd

Genre(s): Biographical, Forensic, Non Fiction

Favourite Quote: "It was hard to imagine that the slender young man who lay naked on the post-mortem table had just finished a killing spree. Everyone in the room – police officers, mortuary staff, even Pam – stared at him with incomprehension. He looked as vulnerable as any victim of crime, as any of his own victims."

***

My area of comfort lies in the world of fiction, but there's really something about memoirs in the field of medicine and science that really gets me.

Perhaps it's because I'm training as a veterinary nurse and the workings of an organic body are fresh and interesting to me like opening presents on Christmas day? Maybe it's the morbidity of my relationship working with death on a near daily basis? Either way, Dr Shepherd takes us into his world as he goes from shiny faced new graduate through to internationally acclaimed forensic pathologist.

The book starts off gnarly as Dr Shepherd opens with the silence of Hungerford after a particularly infamous murder spree. It's a cold, bleary beginning and we're shoved into the fat of the action amidst the beginning of his career as a pre qualified, bright eyed student.

We're brought with him through the highs and lows of his career and more than a few high profile cases are brought to the forefront, as we're poised at the very edge of the scalpel, ready to jump into the next body. Eventually, we're led to understand that this world takes a dark and lonely hold and exactly how it impacts on a person's personal lives and experiences.

The one thing that strikes me through my reading experience, is that Dr Shepherd doesn't refer to his cadavers in as a disjointed way as I would expect for someone in this field to do, but treats them with the respect that they may not have deserved to read the point of his table. Whether assailant or victim, man or baby, they receive the same patience and process for him to reach his conclusion. I find this really interesting and honestly, if I had a mass murderer on my table, I don't think I would be able to afford them the same respect without feeling some kind of biased emotion to the lives they'd taken. This only bows into the notion that working in this field, there simply isn't time for emotion or judgement on anything that isn't factual or evidence based. As Dr Shepherd frequently explains in his pages, only the dead can provide the full truth.

I did find myself sometimes getting lost in the text and having to quickly backtrack to find and just clarify what was going on. But Unnatural Causes does a really fabulous job of embodying the horrors versus the morbid curiosity of the subject matter. I can feel his words and his voice in every page and Dr Shepherd does a great job of allowing his reader not to be too emotionally influenced by the situation, a skill greatly practiced by him.

Overall, I really enjoyed this and would definitely read it again. Would it make me seek out a similar book of this genre? Probably not without something to really hook me on as I feel that I've had enough background of forensic pathology as I want at the moment, but would never rule it out.

Words Are Messy overall score: 7.5/10