BITE TO BYTE

Persephone Lewin

Parrel Press, £14.99

Combining the grisly details of murder, sexual assault and forensic pathology with eccentric humour, narrative colour and an eye for the absurd is, one would think, the preserve of the fiction writer – and a gutsy one at that.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, to learn that Persephone Lewin is also pursuing the elusive goal of thriller writing success. Her eccentric and sometimes downright odd asides lift the mood of what would otherwise be a dry tome. Her ability to give narrative drive and colour to the cases in which her husband, David Lewin, uses his increasing abilities as a forensic odontologist to identify murderers, weapons and their victims is burgeoning rather than fully-fledged, but she is very readable.


Bite to Byte is, in essence, a short history of forensic dentistry – more accurately called forensic odontology – as it has evolved from ‘simply’ identifying people from dental records. The book’s thrust is the notion that people like Mr Lewin, in their forensic work, match patterns that happen to be made by teeth, and this pattern matching has many other possibilities.


In a neat progression, Ms Lewin starts with matching toothmarks on a victim, moves to identifying victims by their teeth, then takes us through matching an ashtray used as a murder weapon, an axe linking two murders to one assailant, a button on a pair of jeans, before finally returning to teeth – on a zipper.


Ms Lewin writes with touching affection and occasional hyperbole for her dentist husband, slaving over a hot laptop or a cold corpse. She tries desperately to keep herself out of the book, though she only makes it half-way before throwing caution completely to the wind. But she is a welcome companion, and worth the attention. Who else would write the following chapter footnote?


‘Some people have a thing about bow ties worn outside of formal occasions. Their plus point is that, unlike ties, they are highly practical in places such as mortuaries, where ties can dangle into the products of decomposition. The minus side is that folk tend to distrust their wearers.’


Bite to Byte is filled with asides, comical descriptions and matter-of-fact, sensitive writing when describing the truly awful things human beings do to each other. Ms Lewin has written a personal book, and it is this personality that drives the reader through what could become tedious stuff indeed.


It is difficult to imagine someone who invents a bizarre patron saint of odontology, which features as an occasional character in a book rooted in academic fact, not staring wide-eyed at the products of the evil that men do, while trying to apply putty to a corpse’s mouth. And it is this connection she makes with the reader that makes Bite to Byte the unexpected pleasure to read that it is.