Born to a wealthy Chicago family, Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) was never meant to have a career, yet she became the mother of modern forensics. After years of intensive study in libraries, labs, and autopsy rooms, Lee went on to create The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of dollhouse-sized crime scene dioramas depicting the facts of actual cases in exquisitely detailed miniature. Bruce Goldfarb is an executive assistant to the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore—where these macabre masterpieces reside—and here he traces how this determined woman's models elevated homicide investigation to a scientific discipline.