Geoforensics by Alastair Ruffell and Jennifer McKinley. Wiley‐Blackwell, Chichester, 2008. No. of pages: x+332. Price: UK£32‐50. ISBN 978‐0‐470‐05735‐3 (paperback).
Malcolm Birtle, Linda Stephenson · Geological Journal · 2011
Malcolm Birtle*, Linda Stephenson , * School of Computing, Teesside University, Middlesborough, TS1 3BA, UK, Teesside, UK. The recent increase in popularity in all things ‘forensic’ has led to a number of universities offering courses of study in various flavours of forensic science. The intended readership of this book is undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in the application of geoscience techniques to criminal investigations. Geoforensics is a relatively new discipline. The fact that this book is itself an attempt to define geoforensics is not revealed to the reader until Chapter 10. This also contains chapter summaries and indications on how the content contributes to this definition. Although this is, to us, a novel approach to providing an overview of a book, a chapter summary would have been more useful in an introduction. The definition provided by the book is broad in scope encompassing (or deriving from?) a number of disciplines, some of which are beyond those normally associated with the prefix ‘geo’, such as meteorology and hydrodynamics. Each chapter covers a discipline that provides critical techniques and methods for the geoforensic practitioner. The authors are well placed to produce such a book, clearly having detailed practical experience in the application of geoforensic techniques, particularly in the context of Northern Ireland. The authors state that there are two strong messages in the book that determine the relevance of the content. The first is the need to recognise the increasing litigiousness of society which requires secure, timely and accurate recording of evidence and data. The second is the requirement to preserve evidential material and the ability to pass it securely between analyses from different disciplines. Each chapter illustrates the purpose and application of techniques through the use of examples and case studies. These certainly add interest to what might otherwise be dry summary descriptions of various methods and techniques. The presentation of examples and case studies could perhaps have been improved by ‘boxing’ them to emphasise their separation from the body of the chapters more clearly. Images and figures use colour effectively and photographs are of reasonable quality, if small in some cases. The chapters are self-contained and can be read without reference to others. Chapters range in scale from landform studies to microscopic techniques, and in abstraction from direct manipulation of physical items to statistical analysis of remotely sensed data. Some more recent computing developments are not included, for example, the increasing capability, power and availability of portable digital devices and associated software. The only chapter on software covers Geographic Information Systems, but has little coverage of other types of data acquisition and management tools. The only significant references to web content are to the publishers' and authors' web sites. The index and glossary are too insubstantial for a textbook, particularly if used for reference by students. The reference list is extensive as one would expect. The authors provide quotes from notable literature under each chapter heading which has become an almost compulsory feature in recent years. However, the relevance of some to the chapter content is, at best, tenuous. For example, the precise relationship between Emily Bronte's musings on the slumbers of her deceased characters in Wuthering Heights and geophysics in Chapter 3 is difficult to grasp. The book is a reasonable overview of the subject providing many launch pads for further study by any student wishing to specialise in this discipline.