It is a challenge to take a single murder case (even one with multiple victims) and turn it into a book that can appeal to both general readers and academic specialists. In The Anatomy Murders, Lisa Rosner tries to do just that, providing both a detailed examination of one of the most famous instances of serial murder in British history and a historical contextualization of the time and place where it occurred.

In the late 1820s, William Burke and William Hare (with some assistance from their female partners) killed at least sixteen people in Edinburgh and sold their corpses to anatomy lecturers working in that city's expanding medical research institutions. When they were finally caught, the case generated a level of outrage that has given it an enduring place in the popular memory of serial murder, perhaps rivaled only by Jack the Ripper. One of the strong points of Rosner's book is that she presents not only a history of the case but also a history of the histories written about it, pointing out how its depictions and meanings have subtly changed in the nearly two centuries since they occurred.

She also seeks to offer a broader social, cultural, legal, and scientific history of nineteenth-century Edinburgh. After an introduction that sets out the general contours of the case and a first chapter explaining how it came to light, the chapters that follow each deal with the stories of specific victims as well as significant contextual elements. Rosner explains, for example, the development of scientific teaching in this period. She gives particular attention to the biography of Robert Knox. Knox was not only one of the city's leading anatomists but also the main customer for the deceased commodities offered by Burke and Hare, and he purchased them with an apparent lack of interest about how the two men had acquired their wares. The procedures of anatomical dissection and the fierce competition and rivalries existing among the city's anatomists are given detailed attention. Burke and Hare were far from the only “resurrectionists”—that is, dealers in corpses—active in Edinburgh, and one of the more intriguing sections of the book depicts both the business of grave robbing along with the countervailing efforts by people to defend, sometimes violently, the bodies of deceased neighbors, friends, and family. Another chapter examines Irish immigration (the perpetrators and some of the victims were Irish) and the local context of poverty and inequality: here the specific environment of Edinburgh's “Old Town”—where the crimes were concentrated—is given particular attention. Throughout, the author provides a compelling description of life among that city's impoverished residents.

The criminological background is given some attention, at least in a local and Scottish context, from patterns in crime to beliefs about its motivations and psychology. Here, Rosner's discussion of phrenology is particularly interesting. Although that field's approach was clearly superseded by subsequent scientific knowledge, the author's willingness to take seriously the (always controversial) efforts of phrenologists—especially the extent to which they sought to offer a coherent explanation for criminal behavior that mixed innate and environmental factors—is one example of the fine-grained historical texture apparent in this study of extreme violence. Finally, the techniques of crime investigation and the procedures of court and hangman are detailed in the context of how the criminal case against Burke, Hare, and their accomplices was made and the punishment that resulted.

Despite the book's strengths, there are less satisfying aspects, which are partly related to the divergent tasks that it takes on. It is admittedly difficult to strike the right balance between narrative and context, but there are times when the text takes somewhat meandering discursions that range rather widely—and, ultimately, distractingly—from the main story line without a clear gain to the overall analytical framework. In these instances, the tensions between telling the tale of Burke and Hare and contributing to the more general history of crime are not always successfully navigated. More seriously, while the book is based upon a rich selection of primary sources, it fails to engage with what is now an extensive historiography of violent crime, in particular, a substantial body of work on the cultural meaning of and reactions to violent acts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Relevant work on battles around the scaffold for the bodies of hanged criminals in the eighteenth century or the complicated reactions of execution crowds to witnessing the demise of the condemned is also lacking from the text, citations, and bibliography. The extent to which Edinburgh was similar to or different from other British cities (notably London) is not seriously considered. While such absences do not necessarily undermine the book's interest to a general reader, they do limit its contribution to the historiography of crime and violence, not least since there are many points at which the book's specific interests might usefully have been linked into broader histories of British (and European) social and cultural change.

Thus, for all of the detail provided here about the time and place within which this series of somehow striking (but also, as the text reveals, somehow mundane) killings occurred, the era and environment of the Burke and Hare murders remains detached from relevant cross-cultural and longer-term issues involving science, law, culture, media, and attitudes toward death. The book, a vivid snapshot of urban Scotland in the early nineteenth century, nevertheless often fails to demonstrate what the experiences of its key figures have to say about the wider world of the nineteenth century or the relevance that they might continue to have for us today. Those seeking an engaging, readable, and comprehensive account of this famous case, however, will be well served.