Recent fictive forensic detectives include Clare Rayner's Dr. George Barnabas, Nigel McCrery's Dr. Samantha Ryan, Kathy Reichs's Dr. Temperance Brennan, and Leonard S. Goldberg's Joanna Blalock. Clare Rayner's novels like Flanders: The Poppy Chronicles feature historical settings, whereas the other two writers focus on the present. In McCrery's Silent Witness (1998), the police fix on an unsavory club owner as perpetrator in a pair of ritual killings in Cambridge's fen country (garroting, mutilation, and placement on consecrated ground), but Dr.

Samantha Ryan, the Home Office pathologist, finds compelling forensic evidence that Bird has been framed. In The Spider's Web (1999), Ryan is called in for a second opinion on the autopsy of what seems like an accident victim only to discover forensic evidence of foul play that neither the police forensic expert nor the police superintendent accept until her investigation, assisted by forensic scientist Marcia Evans, unravels a...