Wordcrime, by John Olsson, is about the application of linguistics to crime solving, so anyone who is fascinated with the English language will probably enjoy this book. While the writing is at times a bit dry, this appears to be from a need for the author, a practicing forensic linguist, to simply state the facts of each case. So you won’t find any of the luridness typical of some true crime books.
Each of the book’s 23 chapters covers a different case that the author was involved with, so it can be dipped in and out of. My favourite chapter was "Is the Da Vinci Code Plagiarism?" Although Olsson wants the reader to decide for his/her self on whether Dan Brown plagiarised the work of an earlier novelist, it is pretty clear where he thinks the evidence points on this question, and his analysis behind how writers choose certain words to describe a scene is fascinating.
Equally fascinating, and very poignant, is the author’s analysis of a suicide note for authenticity in "Murder or Suicide?” Olssen draws on the research of suicidologist Edwin Schneidman, combined with analysis of suicide notes from the British Transport Police, to illustrate how popular misconceptions of suicide can be detected in fake suicide notes. It is interesting also how computer databases of words, such as the Oxford and Cobuild corpus, even Google, are now indispensable tools in much linguistic analysis.
At the very least, the reader will come away from this book with the knowledge that the words we use and the way we arrange them can be like fingerprints when it comes to establishing authorship. Even when we are trying to pretend to sound like someone else, our words can in the end betray us.
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