Unnatural celebrity deaths and unnaturally celebrated murders pockmark the history of Los Angeles, looming as large in the public imagination as the Hollywood stars themselves. Death in Paradise is the first authorized history of the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office, revisiting the most culturally significant and forensically complex cases of accidental death, suicide or murder of the famous. It documents the notorious deaths of Senator Robert Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Sharon Tate, Janis Joplin and many others, providing an unflinching view of Tinseltown’s dark, even perverse underbelly.



Brad Schreiber, who wrote the original hardcover for book packager Tony Blanche, has updated many of the fascinating cases in Death in Paradise and added new photographs for this e-book edition. Schreiber, who created the truTV series North Mission Road inspired by this book, also presents some of the lesser-known but most puzzling deaths in the history of Hollywood. Did 1930s comedy film star Thelma Todd accidentally die of carbon monoxide poisoning in her own garage, commit suicide or was she killed by the jealous lover who locked her out of her own house? Death in Paradise highlights the bizarre as well as the renowned. There’s the story of a funhouse dummy that got broken during a TV show filming, only to reveal the mummy of a Wild West gunslinger underneath. Or how about the murderer of a woman who was caught, based upon the ingredients in the exotic cocktail found in his victim’s stomach?



In addition to these mind-bending investigations, Death in Paradise summarizes the surprising origins of early historical medical examiners, the development of forensic science and, of course, the rise of the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner, the most technologically advanced in the world…and the only one with its own gift shop.