What the Dead Know Audiobook By Barbara Butcher cover art

What the Dead Know

Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator

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What the Dead Know

By: Barbara Butcher
Narrated by: Barbara Butcher
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About this listen

“Butcher chronicles her career path and her journey to sobriety in unflinching detail, while her voice remains deliberate and measured, occasionally slipping into what sounds like a half-smirk when cracking a joke….She has a way with words, telling stories that are at turns hilarious, thought-provoking and, as might be expected, disturbing….This is a story of trauma, yes, but it’s also a glimpse into the dark side of a city that most never see up close.” —The New York Times Book Review

Now featured in the five-part docuseries on Netflix, Homicide: New York

A “remarkably candid and sensitive” (
The Wall Street Journal) memoir of more than twenty years of death-scene investigations by New York City death investigator Barbara Butcher.

Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism when she found an unexpected lifeline: a job at the Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City. The second woman ever hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhattan, she was the first to last more than three months. The work was gritty, demanding, morbid, and sometimes dangerous—and she loved it.

Butcher (yes, that’s her real name, and she has heard all the jokes) spent day in and day out investigating double homicides, gruesome suicides, and most heartbreaking of all, underage rape victims who had also been murdered. In What the Dead Know, she writes with the kind of New York attitude and bravado you might expect from decades in the field, investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, 680 of which were homicides. In the opening chapter, she describes how just from sheer luck of having her arm in a cast, she avoided a boobytrapped suicide. Later in her career, she describes working the nation’s largest mass murder, the attack on 9/11, where she and her colleagues initially relied on family members’ descriptions to help distinguish among the 21,900 body parts of the victims.

This is the “breathtakingly honest, compassionate, and raw” (Patricia Cornwell), “completely unputdownable” (Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Left Undone) real-life story of a woman who, in dealing with death every day, learned surprising lessons about life—and how some of those lessons saved her from becoming a statistic herself. Fans of Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, and true crime won’t be able to put this down.

©2023 Barbara Butcher (P)2023 Simon & Schuster Audio
True Crime New York Exciting Funny Inspiring
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What listeners say about What the Dead Know

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Honest, Raw, Heartfelt, Captivating.

I love when an author reads their own work for Audible.

When I heard in a Dutyron youtube video that Barbara Butcher was releasing a book I immediately preordered it on amazon, then when I saw that she was narrating the book on audible I preordered this version as well.

This is such a good book! I loved listening to Barbara's experiences and truth in this captivating performance. I admire her ability to be truthful about the hard parts of life, taking the listener to her darkest times. I knew that I liked Barbara Butcher from her guest appearances I had seen over the past couple years, but this book allowed me to realize how bad ass and cool she really is.

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5 people found this helpful

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Very entertaining and well Narrated

Worthy listen. Well told story by the author who led an interesting life. At first I wanted to know less about her romantic lovers and finally realized she wasn't really writing about the dead but her well-lived life. She hides nothing. Story moves well. First heard about the book from her interview on a podcast about cops and writers.

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3 people found this helpful

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Fascinating

I don’t think I ever contemplated reading (OK, listening to) a memoir by a medical-legal investigator for the Office of the Medical Examiner of NYC. But I’m glad I did. Ms. Butcher’s story is fascinating, morbid, horrifying, and funny - among many other things - and all the more so because it’s not just about what she encountered in her job. It’s also about her life, her bout with alcoholism, how she came to work for the OME, all the job entailed, and how she coped with it - and ultimately excelled at it.

The audiobook greatly benefited from Ms. Butcher’s narration. (As an aside, I think audiobooks of memoirs should all be narrated by the author. She comes across as totally authentic and totally believeable.

My once quibble is that the war stories she tells get a bit repetitious at times, but it’s a minor quibble. Highly recommended.

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Completely captivating!

I have always been fascinated with homicides, suicides and death in general. I’ve often imagined being an ME or death investigator like Barbara Butcher but after hearing her stories, I don’t think I could do it. She’s courageous. Not just because of the job she held for so long but being in recovery, knowing when you’re in such a bad place and you need help, changing directions in life when you thought for sure what you were doing was what you’d do for the rest of your life. Her story is so inspiring and I just wanted to hear more!

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Prepare to live Barbara's life

There is no voice actor that could perform this book and do it justice. Barbara is the only one that could read this to us and have the impact this book has. I am a straight depressive male that has been treated for depression for over twenty years. My job has been my definition of who I am for over 50 years. But now I have a sister who is a not-straight, recovering alcoholic, treated depressive, who took me with her so that I could learn to love someone I will never meet. She took me through the hell of alcoholism and into recovery.. She took me through the hell of the job she loved and was defined by. She took me through the hell of clinical, institutional, recovery from the PTSD created by her job and loss of it. And in doing all this ( in amazing writing ) I changed with her, learned to know myself, and celebrate life as she does. I don't know how she will be able to write a book that can match this for impact and immersion , But I hope she does.

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Barbara Fing Butcher wrote an amazing book

I heard about her on a podcast and bought the book on a whim. Great memoir. And that’s coming cr a person who generally avoids them.

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Fantastic

Came for the gory weird stuff, stayed for the humanity. Impressive lady and an awesome book.

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Great read

Loved listening to this from the author. As a former New Yorker reading about all the murders it was interesting to hear the other side. The book kept me on my toes the whole time.

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Wow. Great Book!

I truly enjoyed this book, from the first page to the last. The chapters regarding 9/11 were especially tough for me. It was very interesting to learn about the various aspects that surround this line of work. I’ve always wondered how they separate themselves from the tragedies they come face to face with each day.

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Wow!

Such an interesting book. It gets into not only the authors life but also the inner workings of what death investigators do. Very educational and interesting!

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