This is the second of John Olsson's Wordcrime books describing forensic linguistics analysis in legal cases. Part 1 is an overview of authorship analysis, explicitly aimed at piquing the interest of a general reader (3). It covers the role of the expert, steps in case preparation, transcription and coding of documents, and linguistic phenomena that are scrutinised for ‘marked’ forms in forensic analysis: spelling and orthography, grammar, lexicon, and idiom. Olsson stresses that a forensic linguist focuses on the linguistic text rather than the legal case, and that s/he takes ‘little interest in the trial's outcome’ (5).

Luckily for readers with an interest in solving crime, the next three parts describe cases and their outcomes. Part 2, ‘Confronting authority’, begins by analysing the police cover-up of causes of death at Hillsborough football stadium in 1989, stating that ‘certain parts of the establishment will look after the establishment with no regard to people's suffering; these elements of the hierarchy will lie to us, and will cover up the truth, for as long as possible’ (25). The following chapters explain linguistic strategies used to fabricate evidence and incriminate defendants through police and witness statements, and the inability of linguistic analysis of rap videos to indicate whether a gang was intending to commit crime. The final chapter shifts to the anti-European discourse used by politicians and campaigners when Britain first joined the European Community in the 1970s, and in the lead up to Brexit.

Part 3, ‘The authority to confront’, begins by showing how a student was cleared of plagiarism. The next chapters discuss whether the gender or age of text-message writers could be determined in a case of attempted sexual contact, followed by a case where harassment letters to a businesswoman were compared with emails from an acquaintance, resulting in a confession. Then a change of scale recounts how an analysis of witness statements contributed to the International Criminal Court withdrawing charges against Uhuru Kenyatta of crimes against humanity. The final two chapters of this part demonstrate how text and email messages were falsified to persuade victims of a murder and a drug crime that they were sent by potential romantic partners.

Part 4, ‘Life in forensic linguistics’, begins with the importance of attention to textual detail, followed by cases illustrating this through the disputed authorship of a will, anonymous letters, letters of complaint, online ratings of products, and emails and texts sent by murder victims. The final chapter investigates the probable identity of ‘S. W. Erdnase’, the unidentified author of a famous nineteenth-century text on card tricks.

The legalistic language throughout More wordcrime gives a window into the world of law, and the introductory chapter is available for free download at https://www.thetext.co.uk. The organisation of the book is somewhat disjointed, and at times there is an uneven balance between description, analysis, and opinion. However, some chapters are pure ‘whodunnit’, and the cases provide a fascinating overview of the role of authorship analysis in criminal cases.