Wardini Book Review: The Final Diagnosis: Obscure cases of death, disease & murder – Cynric Temple-Camp (Harper Collins, $39.99)

The Final Diagnosis: Obscure cases of death, disease & murder by New Zealand pathologist and author Cynric Temple-Camp is a recommended read for true crime fans.

REVIEW

Why are we so fascinated by our mortality, by the fragility of our flesh and bones? New Zealand pathologist Dr Cynric Temple-Camp posits that it is the “why” of illness and death that really piques our interest.

Temple-Camp’s previous books have covered much of his long and esteemed career. This, his third and purportedly final book, covers famous historic cases, the extraordinary hiding in the ordinary, as well as musings on the Covid experience in New Zealand.

The tone is conversational. Sometimes, the dialogue relates mortuary and lab conversations, some presumably paraphrased at such a distance in time.

Temple-Camp has no shortage of anecdotes and cases with which to regale an audience trying to make sense of life through stories of death.

There’s an appendix containing a surprise visitor and the unexpected dangers of excessive peanut consumption (in chapters delightfully entitled ”What on earth have you been eating?: part 1 and part 2″).

“Musings on murder,’” has the perpetrator emailing a relative that “Dunedin is the perfect place to get away with murder as the police are not sophisticated enough to catch anyone in a complicated case.” Don’t pack your bags just yet, though, he was arrested soon after.

A particularly interesting and chilling chapter begins with global pathologists on a teleconference as a coronavirus sweeps from China through Europe. Temple-Camp, characteristically honest, describes himself as bemused and amused, presuming it to be “mass global hysteria”.

Then he takes delivery of a large refrigerated container. The problems that arise suddenly and with no immediate solution are nutted out one by one, at times unconventionally, showcasing the best of humanity scrambling to manage something that ripped at our social fabric.

The Final Diagnosis is for true crime fans, for those who are strong of stomach and voracious in their appetite, and for those who are hungry for the stories that ground us in our mortality. As the blurb states: “The ‘if’ of death is certain. The ‘when’ is unknown. It is the ‘why’ that really gets people’s interest…”

Temple-Camp has some of the answers.