Corpse: Nature, forensics and the struggle to pinpoint time of death by Jessica Snyder Sachs, Perseus, $25, ISBN 073820336X

AMID the plethora of popular books on forensic science, it's hard for writers to find a new slant. But Jessica Sachs has found one: her main themes are entomology, botany and ecology, and in particular how they help to establish time of death. Thankfully, Sachs fully acknowledges the biological variations that prohibit the ludicrous accuracy with which time of death is estimated in so many novels and television dramas.

Corpse uses case histories to illustrate the biological methods available to investigators. Naturally, the book is heavily US-orientated, both in the cases and in the selection of experts and publications-even though most temperature-based methods were developed in Europe.

Perhaps Sachs has cast her net a little too widely in trying to do justice to every aspect of the field. The methods used ...