The strange case of the DNA drama

War thrillers, espionage thrillers, medical thrillers, legal thrillers, crime thrillers — the thriller genre has seen more hues than any other. A recently-popular addition to the list is forensic thrillers — books that detail the latest forensic technology to solve crime.

These technologically enhanced crime writings are overshadowing the old-fashioned murder mysteries that banked solely on deductive reasoning. Surprisingly, this genre is flooded by women writers, many of whom have a professional background in forensic sciences. These writers are skillfully forging their real life experiences into their writing, making their books more techno savvy and credible than ever.

Patricia Cornwell has to be lauded for heralding a change in crime writing by women. She started using state-of-the-art forensic details in her plots which inspired many women writers to follow suit. Though Cornwell is not a trained forensic expert, her work as a criminal journalist, and later as an assistant to a chief medical examiner, has made her well versed in the field of forensic sciences.

Her debut novel Postmortem featured Dr Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist and chief medical examiner for the state of Virginia. When a psychopath starts killing women randomly, Dr Scarpetta is under pressure to unearth new forensic evidence to aid the police. The only clue the killer leaves behind at every crime scene is an industrial soap with borax in it. Cornwell not only ties all the loose ends neatly with Dr Scarpetta finding a crucial DNA fingerprinting evidence but also takes readers through a thrilling tour of forensic procedures.

Each of the 15 novels with Dr Kay Scarpetta as the protagonist makes the dead tell newer tales through the remains of their bones, hair fibre, or DNA!

An account of forensic thrillers is incomplete without a mention of Dr Kathy Reich. Dr Reich is a practising forensic anthropologist who dramatises her professional experiences to churn out spellbinding crime thrillers. Temperance Brennan (Tempe), Reich’s protagonist in 11 novels till date, is the director of forensic anthropology in Quebec. She routinely works with bones and skeletons of mangled bodies to establish the identity of victims. Reich’s debut in 1997, Deja Dead, starts with Tempe having to identify a meticulously dismembered body with a missing torso and limbs, stuffed inside a bag. As Tempe works on the details, she recounts a similar case she had worked on in North Carolina.

Though Reich floods readers with research details at times, she packs enough punch for a thrill seeker. Just when most of us think anthropology is all about studying prehistoric remains, Reich’s books are an eye opener on how it is being put to use in solving present day crimes. Her themes and technologies are very diverse, making each book in the series very distinct. She fleshes out biblical archaeology in Cross Bones, explores the process of fatty acid breakdown and the process of decomposition in Fatal Voyage, and carbon dating in Monday Mourning, among others.

Denise Mina is a forensic criminologist now turned full-time writer. She seamlessly blends her expertise in law and criminal psychology into her plots by exploring the complex issues of modern life and violence. Her protagonists are unlikely heroes — drug dealers, mentally ill, or abused. In her acclaimed Garnet Hill trilogy, she introduces the foul mouthed and depressed Maureen O’Donell.

O’Donell has a dark past with an alcoholic mother, a molesting father, and a drug dealing brother. She is in therapy for eight months for depression and comes out of the hospital with an impossible affair with her married therapist, Dauglas Bradey. Just when she is settling into a boring but steady job and has ended her affair, there is an unfortunate turn of events when Bradey is found murdered in her house. While she knows that she is being cleverly set up by someone, the police turn a deaf ear to her pleas of innocence. When Maureen has nowhere to turn to, she decides to exonerate herself by finding the murderer. Through Maureen’s dysfunctional life and drug addiction, Mina exposes the seamier side of Glasgow as effectively as George Pelicanoes does with Washington DC.

In Mina’s stand-alone novel Sanctum, Susie is a respected criminal psychologist now under threat of a life sentence for murdering a prisoner under her care. Susie’s husband sets out to prove her innocence but ends up opening a Pandora’s box of troubles that divulges lust, obsession, and betrayal. The novel is a powerhouse of psychological insights into what lies under the facade of respectability.

American prime time television went overboard with their forensic crime shows in the early 2000s and now the literary world is going berserk with the same.

Forensics is a branch that lends itself to crime writing. Behind-the-scenes crime solving techniques are of mass appeal, duly lapped up by writers. Ann Rule, Mark Billingham, Jeffrey Deaver, and Iris Johansen are some of the bestselling writers who provide the chills with expertise for readers of the genre.

Vani Mahesh is the proprietor of EasyLib.com, the first online library in Bangalore