Bone to Pick: Forensic Case Files

Welcome to Bone to Pick: Forensic Case Files.

You are the new trainee at a forensic anthropology lab.

This is where bones with no name and no story end up. A bombing, a riverbed, white bone in an incinerator's ash. Read what the bones say, and give the missing dead their names back. That is your mission.

EXAMINING THE EVIDENCE

Shine the light, run the swab. You've watched those hands on TV. Now they're yours.

CLEANING THE BONE

Nothing starts until the bone is clean. And what's in your sink is not the dishes.

LAYING OUT THE SKELETON

Sometimes the clue is the part that isn't there. Set every bone where it belongs.

REFITTING THE FRAGMENTS

Cases leave bones broken. Fit the pieces back together and find what the damage was hiding.

FIRING THE LASER

Sometimes an identity comes down to one tooth, shaved with a laser. Which is not just for show.

MATCHING THE WEAPON

Compare the mark left at the scene and name the weapon. Want to try all of them? After the case is closed, please.

QUESTIONING THE SUSPECT

Put the guilty away. Every piece of evidence turns the case somewhere new.

Read age, sex, old injuries and cause of death from the bones. Pick diatoms out of river mud under a microscope, cast a tire track or an animal's bite mark, and comb the scene for the evidence everyone else walked past. Forensics takes many forms.

Rigorous science, a warm atmosphere. Not scary, not gruesome — a mystery about people.

FROM THE CASE FILES

Seven cases. Seven names waiting. Every one of them a human being, and a truth.

• A car explodes on a street in broad daylight. The body inside is burned beyond recognition. Who planted it, and why?

• Skeletal remains at a construction site. An affair, a shared business, money. Nobody around the victim is without a secret.

• A body on the riverbank: a young reporter. Was it a source, a rival, or…

• A body dissolved into sludge. A celebrated photographer's past hides a motive no one knew.

• Bone burned white in an incinerator's ash — a star hockey player's cruel end. Burn it all and it disappears. Someone must have believed that.

• A politician's future daughter-in-law, found as bones. A break-in gone wrong, or the son himself? Step into the family's shadow.

• A college student's death, closed ten years ago as an accident. The team reads it again. The final case.

PEOPLE OF THE LAB AND THE CITY

Between cases, the lab is your other home. Eavesdrop on your colleagues, chase high scores in the minigames, and fill your archive with every bone, colleague and closed case you meet. From the lab to the city, from the city to the edge of town. Every door that opens brings more people to meet.