Deborah Halber worked as a reporter and science writer before diving headfirst into true crime. Before Serial, Reddit and Making a Murderer, The Skeleton Crew introduced audiences to web sleuths obsessed with cold cases. An Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best Nonfiction, the book was adapted into a Netflix original series. Now, follow along on Deborah’s latest: a page-turning, atmospheric thriller-in-progress → Instagram +Facebook + Medium + X
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Solving cold cases from the comfort of your living room…
The Skeleton Crew
How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America’s Coldest Cases
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 forty 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.
It’s DIY CSI.
The web sleuths pore over facial reconstructions (a sort of Facebook for the dead) 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.
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)Praise for The Skeleton Crew
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"The Skeleton Crew is a carefully crafted account of an intriguing new opportunity for arm chair sleuths... I loved it.”
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"In her brilliant book The Skeleton Crew, Deborah Halber chronicles with lucidity and wit how amateur investigators troll websites … and check online databases looking for matches between the reported missing and the unidentified dead."
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"A lively study that’s part whodunit, part sociological study. . . . The result is eminently entertaining and will be devoured by armchair detectives."
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"Halber weaves together a half-dozen cold cases, and delivers brief profiles of scores of tangential characters. She’s an engaging, artful writer, which helps as the narrative threads start to get tangled.”
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"The book is written so compellingly, I couldn’t put it down, so be warned and realize that you may want to carve out some serious time for this one."
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"...The book opened up a new world to me, someone who thought they had seen it all. I look forward to more from Deborah Halber.”
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