HERE, WHERE DEATH DELIGHTS

A medical examiner reflects on the cases, historical events, and family moments that shaped her life.

Jumbelic’s memoir chronicles her career as a medical examiner, so it’s hardly surprising that it contains a certain amount of blood and gore. But as the author tells the stories of her life through chapterlong vignettes, beginning with her Baltimore childhood and ending with her retirement, she interweaves occasionally gruesome descriptions of autopsies with thoughtful musings about law enforcement, government, and family. Jumbelic’s father’s early death from lung cancer and a high school trip to the morgue pushed her into medical school. She was poised to become a surgeon but swerved to a forensics fellowship and then “spent a career in autopsy suites, examining the dead.” Employed in assorted cities, Jumbelic investigated every variety of death imaginable. They ranged from violent murders to the death of a Bosnian refugee child after a hospital emergency room nurse failed to translate what the kid’s parents were trying to convey about her condition. The author also worked at the sites of many mass disasters, including 9/11’s ground zero. In each case she describes, Jumbelic makes an intriguing or poignant observation, as when she interviewed a woman suspected of murdering her husband and six children. The author looked at the suspect’s purse and noticed that they used the same kind of mascara. Jumbelic and her husband eventually had three sons, and she movingly describes how her experience of parenting was connected to her work. On one occasion, she autopsied a 6-year-old boy who died in a car accident. As she examined the boy, she thought about her own sons and the mother preparing her child for the day, “a morning like dozens of others, a morning like many of mine.” The author compares herself to Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta, and the series’ fans will enjoy this memoir. But it is when Jumbelic intertwines her personal life with her professional one that her writing is most powerful. The case studies are compelling, but the author moves through them so quickly that readers can get lost. If Jumbelic featured fewer cases and allowed herself more room for her wry quips and emotional insights, this book would be even more of a delight.

An intimate yet wide-ranging and absorbing look at a professional life devoted to death.