The funniest book on death investigation you'll ever read. 
 Then it isn't. But I'll get to that. 
 In my soon-to-be-published book, dedicated heroes (one very fuzzy one in particular) look at dead folks to figure out how they got that way. I pick up a lot of books on forensics, and this one was charming, informative, and entertaining. 
 Judy Melinek writes about the beginning of her career working in a New York city morgue. The tone is wry dark humor, the kind of thing you'd expect a private eye to say in a smoke-shrouded monologue. The audio book version has a great voice for that, by the way. Things are well-described but not exploitative and amusing without ever being disrespectful to the deceased. You get giggles and heartache in equal measures. 
 Well, equal measure until the last part of the book, that is. 
 If an author's writing something biographical, they can only control the tone so much. Life has given them the material, and life doesn't care about giving a consistent tone. 
 What I'm working up to is that Melinek was a medical examiner in New York when the planes hit the towers. 
 Wisely, at that point the narrative embraces the change and tone and becomes a solemn but still engaging account of what it was like to try to help identify thousands of victims. It's fascinating stuff, an unsung bit of national heroism more people should know about. 
 Working Stiff helped me get the feel and tone of a New York medical examiner. One or two books down the line, I'm hoping to fit in a little tribute to Judy for that. I'd recommend this one if you love police procedurals; its Izombie without the brain eating. If you don't want to get into the heavy stuff, I suppose you could stop the book when it hits 9/10, but that part is rewarding in another way entirely.