The Chemistry of Death by Simon Beckett

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Arts on the Air | 17.12.2008 | 05:30

Mystery author Simon Beckett

Simon Beckett is a 48-year-old British crime writer who has managed to thrill readers all over the world with his series of books that feature a forensic anthropologist Dr. David Hunter as their main character.

„Whispers of the Dead“, the third David Hunter novel, will appear in January and much to the relief of his fans, there will be a sequel, because at the end of the second book titled “Written in Bone,” it didn’t look good at all for the series hero. Simon Beckett’s first novel “The Chemistry of Death”, from 2006, tends to say a lot about his books - as chemistry place a crucial role in all his murder investigations.



Body of evidence The crimes in Simon Beckett's The Chemistry of Death take a back seat to his convincing and tortured protagonist, says Killian Fox

The Chemistry of Death
by Simon Beckett
Bantam £10, pp363

Maggots, beetles and grave wax are bread and butter to a very distinctive kind of detective in Simon Beckett's fifth novel, a murder mystery set in an isolated community on the Norfolk Broads. As far as the people of Manham are concerned when he settles in their village, David Hunter, the novel's narrator, is a humble GP tired of London life. It's only when two boys stumble across a decomposing corpse in the nearby forest that their new doctor's macabre speciality comes to light.

Assisting the police in their investigations, Hunter struggles to conceal his professional interest in the corpse, but it soon transpires that he is the country's pre-eminent forensic anthropologist. Even the crime scene investigators are baffled by this esoteric occupation, which Simon Beckett, as well as his protagonist, studied for a time at the charmingly named Body Farm, a real-life training centre in Tennessee. Fluent in the language of decomposition, Hunter can read in a rotting body signs that will determine crucial factors such as time since death. But following the car crash that claimed the lives of his wife and daughter, Hunter was unable to maintain the cold, scientific gaze of his profession. Now, he must adopt it once again to help prevent the killer from claiming another victim.

The irony that haunts David Hunter is the best thing about Beckett's novel. So well versed in the minutiae of death, he cannot come to terms with its most fundamental mystery: what becomes of the life that is taken away? As a whodunit, this is certainly a cut above the average, with a convincing central character, a gripping plot and a fine store of morbid information. In contrast to the story's original angle, however, the crimes themselves seem a little bit hackneyed.