Blood on the Table: The Greatest Cases of New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner by Colin Evans

This was a complete impulse grab from Overdrive and I suspect if I'd had read the details more closely I may have skipped it. As it was, this was the only book I read on my vacation, and it's slightly disappointing.

Here's the summary from Goodreads:
For almost a century, New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has presided over the dead. Over the years, the OCME has endured everything-political upheavals, ghastly murders, bloody gang wars, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and non-stop battles for power and influence-and remains the final authority in cases of sudden, unexplained, or violent death. 

Founded in 1918, the OCME has evolved over decades of technological triumphs and all-too human failure to its modern-day incarnation as the foremost forensics lab in the world, investigating an average caseload of over 15,000 suspicious deaths a year. This is the behind-the-scenes chronicle of public service and private vendettas, of blood in the streets and back-room bloodbaths, and of the criminal cases that made history and headlines.

So the summary sounds really terrific, right? I recently (last year?) read Working Stiff which is also a non-fiction memoir about the OCME and assumed this would be similar. It was not.  Blood on the Table is much more a history of the Chief Examiners than of the cases and the science behind them. Yes, there are some case details, but the vast majority of the book deals with the political and personal agendas behind choosing the Chief and the history of the office itself. 

As I read the book, I kept thinking that surely the next chapter/second half of the book would deal with more details than politics, so I kept reading. Ultimately I was disappointed, because honestly I just don't care about the politics of NYC. (Sorry, New York friends!) Would I recommend it to anyone else? Maybe to a very small subset of people. It's not that it was bad, but it was overall forgetful and unexciting- which is amazing for a book about murder.