True stories of life and death from a New Zealand pathologist From the number-one bestselling author of The Cause of Death comes a book about the unlikely, extraordinary, obscure and often tragic ways humans meet their end. A dead body without a trace of trauma; alien parasites; worms of the brain; crocodile attacks and bizarre eating disorders … In The Quick and the Dead, pathologist Dr Cynric Temple-Camp takes readers into a world of disease and death as he seeks answers for those who were unlucky, and those still alive to tell the tale.