Description

Thoughtprovoking truecrime thrillerthe book raises urgent questions of balancing public and private good that well likely be dealing with as long as the title impliesWall Street Journal

A relentless detective and a civilian genealogist solve a haunting cold caseand launch a crimefighting revolution that tests the fragile line between justice and privacy

In November 1987 a young couple from the idyllic suburbs of Vancouver Island on an overnight trip to Seattle vanished without a trace A week later the bodies of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and her boyfriend Jay Cook were found in rural Washington It was a brutal crime and it was the perfect crime With few clues and no witnesses in the vast and foreboding Olympic Peninsula an international manhunt turned up empty and the sensational case that shocked the Pacific Northwest gradually slipped from the headlines

In deepfreeze longterm storage biological evidence from the crime sat waiting as Detective Jim Scharf poured over old case files looking for clues his predecessors missed Meanwhile 1200 miles away in California CeCe Moore began her lifelong fascination with genetic genealogy a powerful forensic tool that emerged not from the crime lab but through the wildly popular home DNA ancestry tests purchased by more than 40 million Americans When Scharf decided to send the cold cases decadesold DNA to Parabon NanoLabs he hoped he would finally bring closure to the Van Cuylenborg and Cook families He didnt know that he and Moore would make history

Genetic genealogy long the province of family tree hobbyists and adoptees seeking their birth families has made headlines as a cold case solution machine capable of exposing the darkest secrets of seemingly upstanding citizens In the hands of a tenacious detective like Scharf genetic genealogy has solved one baffling killing after another But as this crimefighting technique spreads its sheer power has sparked a national debate Can we use DNA to catch the murderers among us yet still protect our last shred of privacy in the digital agethe right to the very blueprint of who we are