A girl on a farm is devoured by pigs. A walker’s throat is slit by the broken-off blade of a lawn mower after it hits a stone. A woman fires 13 bullets into the body of her seemingly sleeping father but is cleared of murder because he had died of an aneurysm three hours earlier.
Miniature tragedies like these cram the pages of the books of the Belgian forensic pathologist Philippe Boxho, and explain why his bestsellers are at numbers one, two and three of France’s nonfiction charts: they are macabre but also darkly comic and, above all, true.
