Death, at the risk of stating the obvious, is something that most of us endeavor to avoid, even in conversation. We invent euphemisms to blunt its finality -- "dearly departed" "passed away" and my favorite, "passed from the scene."

It's not merely the fear of the inevitable that motivates us, but a sense of propriety as well. Death is just so unseemly.

Not everyone has the luxury of such niceties. Some people must face death every day, like the men and women whose work John Temple documents in his compelling new book.

This is a chronicle of several weeks Temple spent during the summer of 2000 in the Allegheny County Coroner's Office, exploring every stage of a death investigation, up to a hearing at which a homicide suspect learns whether he will have to stand trial.

Temple, a former Pittsburgh newspaper reporter who teaches journalism at West Virginia University, tells his story through the eyes of the deputy coroners who perform the initial investigation when a death is accidental or appears to be suspicious.

They are the first to examine a body at the scene and they make a preliminary determination as to the cause and time of death. The deputy coroners also have the unenviable task of notifying the next of kin, so their job necessarily entails some emotional distance.

"If you can't bear tragedy with a certain level of detachment, then you probably won't last long. The trick is to be detached without growing callous," Temple writes. "On difficult cases, Ed Strimlan reminds himself that he is not to blame for the victim's misfortune, and that he can best help by doing a good investigation."

Temple's book is unsentimental about death, and at times his prose takes on the staccato rhythm of a good crime novel.

He is unsparing but never gratuitous in his account of what death does to the human body, and he takes his readers step-by-step through autopsies as performed by forensic pathologists.

"Deadhouse" provides a concise and fascinating history of forensic pathology stretching back to the Middle Ages, including the evolution of the office of coroner in the United States.

In 1965, Dr. William R. Hunt became the first physician elected coroner in Allegheny County, and he set about to professionalize the office by hiring a young forensic pathologist named Cyril Wecht.

Wecht, of course, became famous nationally for challenging the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President Kennedy and locally for his numerous and venomous feuds with his political adversaries.

Out of the spotlight, Temple says that Wecht transformed the coroner's office. "The average shooting victim in Pittsburgh gets a painstaking and professional autopsy, a better postmortem than the president received in 1963."

Temple also examines the public's fascination with forensic science, from the "CSI" TV franchise back to Sherlock Holmes. One early 20th-century medical detective treated Arthur Conan Doyle's novels like textbooks, Temple writes.

"Ever since then ... forensic experts have been portrayed -- or portrayed themselves -- as Sherlockian: condescending, all-knowing and nearly infalliable," Wecht being no exception, of course.

But the coroner is merely a supporting player. The heroes are the deputies who do the grunt work of the office for little glory and meager pay.

They haul away bloated bodies that have been floating for days in the Allegheny River; they help a mother who has fainted after seeing a Polaroid of her dead son; and they preside over the arraignment of an accused killer who they know from their neighborhood.

And they face every day what the rest of us spend our lives trying to avoid.

"It's your job to hide death from others," Temple writes, "but maybe you get really good at hiding it from yourself as well."