Unraveling a twenty-five-year tale of multiple murder and medical deception, The Death of Innocents is a work of first-rate journalism told with the compelling narrative drive of a mystery novel.  More than just a true-crime story, it is the stunning expose of spurious science that sent medical researchers in the wrong direction--and nearly allowed a murderer to go unpunished. On July 28, 1971 a two-and-a-half month-old baby named Noah Hoyt died in his trailer home in a rural hamlet of upstate New York. He was the fifth child of Waneta and Tim Hoyt to die suddenly in the space of seven years. People certainly talked, but Waneta spoke vaguely of "crib death." There was plenty of unease, but over time the talk faded. Nearly two decades later a district attorney in Syracuse, New York was alerted to landmark paper in the literature on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome--SIDS--that had been published in a prestigious medical journal in 1972.  Written by a prominent researcher at a Syracuse medical center, the article described the brief lives and sudden deaths of "N.H." and his sister "M.H.", part of a family in which three other children had died suddenly without explanation. The more the D.A. pushed and probed, the more he was convinced something was very wrong about this account. It was the start of an intensive quest by a team of investigators, and it came to its climax on April 20, 1995, when after a dramatic trial Waneta Hoyt was found guilty of the murder of all her children. But this book is more than a vivid account of infanticide revealed. It is also a riveting medical detective story. That journal article by a charismatic doctor had legitimized the deaths of the last two babies by theorizing a cause for the mystery of SIDS, suggesting it could be predicted and prevented, and fostering the presumption that SIDS runs in families.  In the years thereafter, this theory became the prevailing wisdom about SIDS, every new parent's nightmare. More than two decades of studies have failed to confirm any of these widely-accepted premises. How this happened-- could have happened--is a compelling story of high-stakes medical research in action. And the enigma of familial SIDS has given rise to a special and terrible irony.  Today there is a maxim in forensic pathology: One unexplained infant death in a family is SIDS. Two is very suspicious. Three is homicide. A rule of thumb in forensics: one dead baby is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome(SIDS); two dead babies is suspicious; three dead babies is murder. The Death of Innocents starts off a bit slow, but as soon as a new district attorney decides to pursue an old case of five siblings whose deaths were attributed to SIDS, the story kicks into high gear. There are two villains: the quietly furious mother who admitted to smothering her children--one of whom was 2 years old, and kicked and flailed as he died--and the arrogant medical researcher who was so eager to make a name for himself that he was willfully blind to the warnings of danger. Richard Firstman and Jamie Talan, a husband-wife team, write about abuse of the scientific method as suspensefully as they write about parental abuse of babies. The Death of Innocents was named a 1997 Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times . The NYT writes, The Death of Innocents "...seamlessly weaves the tales of the earlier and later murder cases, separated by two decades, with the complicated scientific and social issues, the many disparate personalities, documents, interviews and dramatic moments. The book is paced like a thriller, and it will be read like one." So starts the 1961 Journal article "Slaughter of the Innocents: A Study of Forty-Six Homicides in Which the Victims Were Children" (L. Adelson. 1961;264:1345-49). This classical theme echoes throughout the accompanying grim editorial, "Murder in the Tower" (1961;264:1368-69). Thirty-seven years later, the same themes of passion, corruption, and the death of sweet children reverberate through the pages of The Death of Innocents: A True Story of Murder, Medicine, and High-Stakes Science. The book opens with a gripping tale of the investigation into the deaths of the three Van Der Sluys siblings -- deaths that had been written off as due to accidental choking or the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Ten years, three exhumations, and a dramatic trial later, the dogged determination of a group of tenacious law-enforcement officials was rewarded when a judge found the father of the children guilty of murder. He had suffocated the children for the life-insurance money. If the book had ended there, it would have been a better-than-average true-crime story, but it would not have been reviewed in the Journal. What makes this book appropriate for review in these pages is a piece of the medical literature itself. In 1972, Pediatrics published an article that described five patients with abnormally prolonged periods of apnea, two of whom were siblings who even