The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death offers readers an extraordinary glimpse into the mind of a master criminal investigator.

Frances Glessner Lee, a wealthy grandmother, founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and was later appointed captain in the New Hampshire police.

In the 1940s and 1950s she built dollhouse crime scenes based on real cases in order to train detectives to assess visual evidence. Still used in forensic training today, the eighteen Nutshell dioramas, on a scale of 1:12, display an astounding level of detail: pencils write, window shades move, whistles blow, and clues to the crimes are revealed to those who study the scenes carefully.

Corinne May Botz's lush color photographs lure viewers into every crevice of Frances Lee's models and breathe life into these deadly miniatures, which present the dark side of domestic life, unveiling tales of prostitution, alcoholism, and adultery. The accompanying line drawings, specially prepared for this volume, highlight the noteworthy forensic evidence in each case. Botz's introductory essay, which draws on archival research and interviews with Lee's family and police colleagues, presents a captivating portrait of Lee.

Morbid, meticulous miniatures.

I'd love to give this book four stars - it was enthralling and I spent an afternoon marveling at it - but honestly the photographs were not what I wanted. If the text is going to draw attention to particular points in the models, it would be nice if the photographs showed those points. Which they frequently do not.

I normally don't read the introductions to photography books, but in this case I'm glad I did. Lee was a fascinating woman, well worth a full biography (which I'd love to read if it exists) and there was just enough analysis of the models as art to fulfill my curiosity, but not too much. They weren't conceptualized as art, after all, even if they were executed as such. ( )

A big disappointment. It's photographs of meticulous miniature scenes, made by a woman who was a forensics professor to train detectives. So the very idea of that is rather cool, but that's about it. They took a quirky interesting thing and attempted to spin it into something dep and profound. The photos show the level of detail but are more artsy than revealing. They don't give any sense of scale and many things mentioned in the text aren't shown.

Then, there's the text which reads like a gender studies book from the 70s, about how the closed window may represent the female victim's circumscribed life, stuff like that. The descriptions of the rooms throw in quotes from all over the place that sound hip but don't seem to actually have anything to do with the scene. There are also a lot of editing errors, like referring to a location as "the premise" instead of "the premises". In one of the crime scenes there's a picture of an elk over the fireplace, and the text goes on about how there's a picture of a moose and what is the significance of a picture of the largest mammal in North America? Well, NONE, because it isn't a moose, it's an elk.

Most annoying of all, since most the rooms are still being used to train detectives, the solutions to the problems aren't included. It's like reading a mystery with the last chapter torn out. ( )

This book is amazing. Though the content is likely a bit morbid for most to consider it a coffee table book, had I coffee table, it would definitely be prominently displayed on mine. The book discusses the career of Frances Glessner Lee, a woman Corinne May Botz describes as:

“…brilliant, witty , and, by some accounts, impossible woman. She gave you what she thought you should have, rather than what you might actually want. She had a wonderful sense of humor about everything and everyone, excluding herself. The police adored and regarded her as their “patron saint,” her family was more reticent about applauding her and her hired help was “scared to death of her.”

Raised in an ultra-traditional, very wealthy family, Lee spent a good majority of her young life thwarted, though she was exposed to home decorating skills that would stand her in good stead when she began making the Nutshell Studies. Unable to attend college as she wanted, once her parents died, Lee started to come into her own, both metaphorically and literally, as she then had plenty of wealth to support her interests. She met a man by the name of George Magrath, a medical examiner who testified in criminal cases in New England. Magrath enthralled the young Lee, and it was through Magrath and his knowledge that Lee began to see what would become her life work.

Read the rest of the review here: http://ireadoddbooks.com/?p=147 ( )