Simon Beckett – The David Hunter series

As a journalist Simon Beckett visited the National Forensic Academy in Knoxville, Tennessee, better known as the “Body Farm”. The NFA is an institution training police officers and crime scene investigators for their work of detecting and solving murder cases. In order to create conditions as close to reality as possible, the NFA uses real human corpses, burying them underground or hiding them in the forest. By analysing bruises to the body and damage to bones, for instance, valuable information is gathered as to the cause of death. Whereas the state of decomposition – taking into account weather conditions such as temperature and humidity – may give quite an accurate estimate of time since death, thereby narrowing down the timeframe in which the crime occurred.

This visit to the NFA gave Beckett the inspiration for creating the forensic anthropologist David Hunter, the main character of his thrillers, of which four have so far been published:

The Chemistry of Death

Written in Bone

Whispers of the Dead

The Calling of the Grave