The Skeleton Crew

How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America's Coldest Cases

By: Deborah Halber

Narrated by: Laural Merlington

The Skeleton Crew provides an entree into the gritty and tumultuous world of Sherlock Holmes-wannabes who race to beat out law enforcement - and one another - at matching missing persons with unidentified remains. In America today, upwards of 40 thousand people are dead and unaccounted for. These murder, suicide, and accident victims, separated from their names, are being adopted by the bizarre online world of amateur sleuths. The web sleuths pore over facial reconstructions and other online clues as they vie to solve cold cases and tally up personal scorecards of dead bodies. The Skeleton Crew delves into the macabre underside of the Internet, the fleeting nature of identity, and how even the most ordinary citizen with a laptop and a knack for puzzles can reinvent herself as a web sleuth.

©2014 Deborah Halber (P)2014 Tantor

Critic reviews

"A lively study that's part whodunit, part sociological study.... The result is eminently entertaining and will be devoured by armchair detectives." ( Publishers Weekly)

Story was all over the place at the start

It is worth the read once you get past the start. It is all over the place and then finds its pacing.

Murder has never been so dry

Narrator speaks very slowly, story drags in several places. Interesting overall! Listen at 1.5x speed

Good ideas that don't quite flow

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It was not very fluid and jumped around without warning. As someone from Boston, I also couldn't help but winced when the narrator said Whitey Bulger's last name incorrectly. If you like true crime it's good but you must pay close attention or risk confusion!

Amazingly written true tale!

If you could sum up The Skeleton Crew in three words, what would they be?

I loved this book! It was incredibly researched and well-written and it was all true! It makes you think why we ever listened to fiction because something like this exists where you are learning and enthralled. Great listen!

Any additional comments?

I loved this book! It was incredibly researched and well-written and it was all true! It makes you think why we ever listened to fiction because something like this exists where you are learning and enthralled. Great listen!

A Fascinating Read

Really enjoyed learning about the real life amateur online sleuth subculture. The book is loaded with case studies told in a narrative fashion full of interesting descriptions and insight.

I Don't Understand

I'll admit that I had a hard time paying attention to this book. It skipped around between cases in a way that was difficult to follow over audio. I was also sort of put off by the way the author described her horror every time she was faced with a corpse. I personally have never been face to face with a severely damaged corpse, or a suicide or murder victim. I do understand a reasonable amount of apprehension when facing the body of a person who has died suddenly or violently, but they're not going to hurt the observer at all, and I don't understand the fear. Although she has the right to express her feelings and describe her discomfortI feel like that fear created a sort of undue campy spookiness where it wasn't needed.

Edited bizarrely

Would not recommend. Edited in a way that the chapters seem to end abruptly, and there are pauses edited in that give it a strange cadence - as though the narrator was given the whole script with no paragraph or chapters breaks. The story itself is interesting but is so judgemental about many of the subjects as to be off-putting.

Started compelling, ended wonderfully, looooong road inbetween

The first 2-3 chapters were wonderfully written and interesting. The last 4-5 were great! The rest of the book could have easily been condensed into 3-4 and, likely, even 2-3 chapters. It would have lost nothing and kept interest running through the whole book. I fell asleep or left it running by accident when I removed my headphones during the middle 1/2 to 5/8ths of the book, rewound it a 1/2 hour or hour, only to find I had only missed 1-2 necessary pieces of information and maybe 5-10 minutes of compelling pros.

My advice: pay attention at the beginning and end, but put the middle 9-10 chapters on background noise while you do chores.

May be better to read than to listen

Being interested in true crime, I expected more from this title. I was disappointed in how much the story bounced around. It was very hard to follow.