Blood, Sand and Silicon
Memoirs of a Defiant Scientist
Geneva, November 21, 2003, 8:25 in the morning. Four armed police officers knock on the door of a hotel room. The man who opens it is not a terrorist. He is the scientist who taught the French gendarmerie how to read a crime scene.
These are his memoirs, written in the heat of the moment, sometimes from a cell, and arranged today as a narrative. The story of a man who refused to submit.
196 pages · 15.2 × 22.9 cm · Paperback with flaps · ISBN 979-13-993046-2-6
Available in English, French and Spanish
A Genius at the Crime Scene
82 true cases of forensic science and dark humor
A dinner party among friends. One guest cancels at the last minute and the hostess, superstitious to the bone, realizes with horror that they will be thirteen at table. Rather than spoil the evening, they decide to invite the first stranger to walk past the door.
For ten years, Loïc Le Ribault was the last resort of judges and gendarmes: the expert they called when a case seemed lost. From those years he brought back 82 rigorously true stories: monumental blunders, spontaneous confessions, truths stranger than fiction, and the dark humor with which those who live alongside death protect themselves from it.
176 pages · 15.2 × 22.9 cm · Paperback with flaps · ISBN 979-13-993046-5-7
Available in English, French and Spanish
Earlier books
The Dissident Scientist
A book by John Walker on the life of Loïc Le Ribault
John Walker’s book explores the story of Loïc Le Ribault and his discovery of organic silicon. Le Ribault, introduced to the study of sand at the University of Paris, developed a new science, exoscopy, by examining grains of sand under the scanning electron microscope. His discoveries were used by the French police to solve criminal cases, but he was forced to close his laboratory. He then devoted his life to research on organic silicon, which led to his being imprisoned twice. Walker presents Le Ribault as a dissident scientist and offers a perspective that is part thriller, part tale, with a touch of humor, on his life and discoveries.
Présentez… Âme!
Loïc Le Ribault’s first novel
“This hyper-concentrated biographical summary will surely convince you that Loïc Le Ribault is better entitled than anyone to confuse hell and heaven, angels and demons, Satan and Jehovah. It is to that little game of mix-ups and vice-versas that he invites you in this book of corrosive humor. I hope you will take as much pleasure as I did in reading this report from the hereafter, which is above all a caricature of the here-and-now. After which, if anyone asks you whether Loïc Le Ribault is a brilliant scientist or a gifted writer, you need only reply that you don’t like being asked trick questions.”
Qui a peur de Loïc Le Ribault ?
An inconvenient doctor of science
Loïc Le Ribault, doctor of science, committed two unforgivable crimes:
- Renovating French forensic science, which had not evolved in half a century.
- Devoting his second life to organic silicon.
To eliminate this nuisance, the French State tried everything: theft of patents and inventions, counterfeiting, plagiarism, defamation, falsification of documents, censorship, deprivation of civil rights and even arbitrary imprisonment. The Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Justice, the Order of Pharmacists, the Order of Physicians and the University joined forces to try to make this free electron disappear.
Yet Le Ribault survives: it is he himself who recounts his incredible adventure in this book, not a line of which is invented.
