How to Solve a Cold Case

How to Solve a Cold Case; And Everything Else You Wanted To Know About Catching Killers
Rating: ★★★
isbn: 9781443459372
Publication Date: April 19, 2022
Pages: 339
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins

Get inside the mind of an elite cold case investigator and learn how to solve a murder.

Despite advances in DNA evidence and forensic analysis, almost half of murder cases in Canada and the US remain unsolved. By 2016, the solved rate had dropped so significantly in the United States that it was the lowest in recorded history, with one in two killers never even identified, much less arrested and successfully prosecuted. And the statistics are just as bad in Canada.

As a sought-after global expert and former detective, Arntfield has devoted his career to helping solve cold cases and serial murders, including the creation of the Western University Cold Case Society, which pairs students with police detectives to help solve crimes.

In How to Solve a Cold Case, Arntfield outlines the history of cold case squads in Canada and the US, and lays out the steps to understanding and solving crime. Arntfield shows you what to look for, how to avoid common mistakes, recognize patterns and discover what others have missed. Weaving in case studies of cold crimes from across Canada and the US, as well as a chapter on how armchair detectives can get involved, How to Solve a Cold Case is a must-read for mystery fans and true crime buffs everywhere.

I’ve been in a slump recently and have been re-reading some of the long-timers on my shelves, hoping they will nudge me out of it.  They haven’t.  This book has been lingering on my library pile, quietly giving me the side-eye while silently reminding me that I’ve already renewed it 3 times and that’s my library’s limit.  So I picked it up and gave it a go.

Now, it might be because I’m in a slump and I’m feeling a bit harsh as a result, but I didn’t like this book.  It was only about 10% of what I’d hoped, which were case studies and discussion of little known cold cases and how they were solved.  The remaining 90% was divided up between first year University level lecturing (60%) and self promotion (20%).

More than half of the lecturing portion of the book was about the sexually deviant nature of serial killers – and he makes it clear that anyone that murders more than once is a serial killer.  I won’t dispute this, which isn’t for me to do anyway, but it feels a bit excessive to call 2 murders a serial.  I bring it up because this definition might leave readers feeling even more despondent about humanity than they already do.  A reader on the more sensitive, or impressionable, end of the spectrum might never want to leave their house again, or allow their children to ever see sunlight.  Especially women, of course.  Honestly, by the end of the book, a reader would give a lot to read about a good old fashioned murder for inheritance.

Mostly, I think, I just didn’t like his writing.  I wanted to DNF it, but I kept hoping for more case studies, which the author included just enough of to keep me on the string, but by the 75% mark there was some heavy skimming because I just wanted it to be over.