To understand what it is like reading this book, consider the following paragraph of my own composition:

"I was once called the park, where some aliens had landed in a UFO. It was awesome and I got to do some really cool stuff. By the way, it is important to realise that the experience of talking to aliens is completely different in South Africa from what it is like in the rest of the world. This is because South Africans are diverse and have different social and cultural backgrounds."

This book concerns itself with one of the most fascinating and perennially topical subjects in all of non-fiction, and yet it is almost as completely devoid of the lavish National Geographic style dioramic case histories as it is of substantiated scientific comparisons. It therefore fails as a popular work on forensic anthropology on every level.

As a biography, it fares no better. The fascinating life of the author is hinted at in places but, as with the cases, the treatment is superficial and the reader is left begging for more interesting details.

What this book turns out to be is literary equivalent of South Africans sitting around the fire saying, "Let's just get one thing straight: apartheid was bad." And so it was, but Coca-Cola tastes the same whether you drink it from a can or a calabash, and I would have expected the modern science of forensic anthropology to be treated less self-consciously, and less apologetically.

With that said, the book does contain some fascinating nuggets of information. From the description of difficulties of using internationally accepted forensic software to the fascinating story of the excavations in Cobern Street, Cape Town, a block away from the location of my daily travails, the amazing specialist knowledge of the author shines through where it is allowed to.

This book was pleasant to read - even compelling in places. Overall, however, I feel that it raised more questions than in answered, by quite a considerable margin.

Why might this be? I suspect that this is not so much the preference of the author as it is of the publisher. A great many South African books have the same flavour: a sugary raising of the hand to notify the world that we do the same stuff as they do, with creamy nuggets of white guilt thrown into the mix. That is what it takes to get a popular work published in South Africa, and we have no shortage of writers willing to comply.

Missing & Murdered gives me the feeling that Prof. Morris is not willingly complicit, and I look forward to reading some of his other, less commercial work. Perhaps it is in that aspect that Missing & Murdered does not fail. With the number of questions it raises, anybody with the slightest interest in the subject matter will feel compelled to do more research. ( )