TV crime drama fans, mystery readers, or the morbidly curious can hear Kathy Reichs on January 27 discuss how to properly assess skeletal remains from a crime scene (should you ever need to). Reichs, vice president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, is a forensic anthropologist, which means she “assists in the identification of deceased individuals whose remains are decomposed, burned, mutilated or otherwise unrecognizable.”

In addition to her scholarly writings (”Quantified comparison of frontal sinus patterns by means of computed tomography”) and her work at Ground Zero as part of the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, Reichs is also the author of 11 highly accurate crime novels—“My books are not for the fainthearted.” She and her fictional hero Temperence Brennan (a forensic anthropologist too) share the same CV, minus the alcoholism. Cleverly, in Bones, the TV series that spun off from the novels, Brennan is an author who writes about a fictional forensic anthropologist named Kathy Reichs.

In an interview with the Smithsonian Magazine, Reichs explained that she got her start because “I was doing archaeology, and the police started bringing me cases. If there was a local bones specialist at a university, often law enforcement would take skeletal remains there.”

In the same interview, she comments on a terrifying, made-for-TV moment during while testifying in court:

“There was one trial in the States in which the defendant said he was going to kill me. They couldn’t bring extra cops into the courtroom because that would be prejudicial, but they put them at the doors. They said, “If he comes at you, just get down.” I thought, if he comes at me, I’m diving behind the judge. (The defendant was convicted.)”