Meg Gardiner - Gardiner On Jo Beckett

Gardiner On Jo Beckett

"Jo is law enforcement's last resort in baffling cases," says Gardiner, "but she's not a cop. She's a doctor — a forensic psychiatrist who analyzes dead people for the police. She's a deadshrinker.

"When the San Francisco Police Department runs out of leads and the crime lab can't figure out why a victim has died, they call on Jo to perform a psychological autopsy. Her job is to find the truth in ambiguous cases — the cases that frustrate the police and leave victims' families bewildered in their grief. She delves into victims's state of mind to determine whether their deaths are suicide, accident or homicide.

"Jo doesn't pick up gory bits of trace evidence with tweezers. She digs into people's passions, obsessions and secrets to find out what killed them. Her territory is the psyche and the human heart."

"Jo calls herself a deadshrinker," Gardiner says in a Poe's Deadly Daughters interview. "She analyzes the dead for the police. She's the last resort in baffling cases. When the cops and the medical examiner can't determine the manner of a victim's death, they turn to Jo to perform a psychological autopsy and figure out whether it was accident, suicide, or murder.

"Jo looks at victims' emotional, moral, and psychological lives to figure out why they died. She digs beneath the clinical what and how of the police lab, into the messy, mysterious, and spooky realm of the mind. And that's what fascinated me about her job.

"CSI is great, but I wanted to go beyond it. In the real world, crime lab technology is not an infallible truth-o-meter. Physical evidence is not in fact bulletproof. Real life is murkier—and more fascinating. That's what Jo explores. She goes beyond DNA sequencing and gas chromatography to uncover why a victim has died. And she can come at cases from fresh, atypical angles."