"Thought-provoking true-crime thriller...the book raises urgent
questions of balancing public and private good that we'll likely be
dealing with as long as the title implies."--Wall Street
Journal
A relentless detective and a civilian genealogist solve a haunting cold
case--and launch a crime-fighting 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 deep-freeze, long-term storage, biological evidence from the crime
sat waiting, as Detective Jim Scharf poured over old case files looking
for clues his predecessors missed. Meanwhile, 1,200 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 case's
decades-old DNA to Parabon NanoLabs, he hoped he would finally bring
closure to the Van Cuylenborg and Cook families. He didn't 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 crime-fighting 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 age--the right to
the very blueprint of who we are?
