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Mary Roach likes to write about dead people And sex. And also space. All interesting topics, though some more pleasant than others.

Mary Roach is a woman with an enviable writing career and very lovely reddish-blond hair. As she says on her website, she’s not a scientist, but she is smart enough to harass scientists into teaching her what she wants to know. Having dated several scientists, this is a definite skill.

Her first book, “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” follows the various mischief your corpse can get into post-breathing, should you opt for something less than the traditional pine box or tiny urn on your loved one’s fireplace mantel. Such activities include testing everything from weapons to the safety of automobiles, aiding med students in honing their scalpel skills, or showing forensic specialists exactly what a body would look like if it were abandoned in a forest on a warm summer’s day for five to seven hours. Messy work for both the living and the dead, but valuable all the same.

Informative and disgusting, “Stiff” is not a book to bring up while at a dinner party, hosted by your future in-laws who you’ve just met. Unless your in-laws are weirdos. In that case, let the grossing-out commence. And did you really want to marry that stuck-up jerk/bimbo who questioned your reading taste anyway? I say, you’re better off.

Fantastic! Now that you’ve thrown away all hope of marital bliss, you’ll have plenty of time to read the rest of Madame Roach’s books. Despite having only four in publication so far, the topics discussed run a wide enough gamut that there is a Roach paperback for every curious mind. After “Stiff” came “Spook,” a scientific search for the human soul/spirit, followed by “Bonk,” a biological and physiological study on sex. If you’ve ever wondered, what does Viagra have to do with pandas, then “Bonk” is the book for you. This past October, Roach published her fourth piece, titled “Packing for Mars.” I haven’t read it yet, but it promises to teach me more about ejecting bodily fluids in zero gravity than I ever wanted to know. I can’t wait.

As October drew to a close, I thought I’d take one last crack at Halloween related reading material. With such chapter titles as ‘Soul in a Dunce Cap‘ and ‘Chaffin vs. The Dead Guy in the Overcoat,’ “Spook” seemed an appropriate and intriguing choice. Roach starts the book out with a vow to remain as open-minded as possible while questing for the human soul. A skeptic and non-believer by nature, she seems to want nothing more than to be proven wrong through real, hard evidence of life after death. Of course, even before I read the first page, I knew her search would be fruitless. Considering this book came out five years ago, and barring a world-wide government conspiracy, I think it likely we would have all seen the Barbara Walters special by now if Roach really had communicated with those in the great beyond.

Still, no one can deny, just as with all her other books, she flung herself mercilessly into this project. Mary Roach is the sort of researcher that college professors have sexy dreams about. She interviewed doctors testing cardiac patients for out of body experiences. She poured over 19th century journals on the various ridiculous attempts to measure the soul, including the infamous study of dying patients claiming we all lose 21 grams of body weight upon the moment of expiration. To better understand the subtle art of psychic mediums, she attended an actual class on it, subjecting herself to all sorts of scorn and hilarity at the hands of her fellow pupils. I honestly know the feeling. At childhood slumber parties, deranged though my imagination was, I simply could not believe that some spirit would take the time to painstakingly spell out the names of all the cute boys in our fourth grade class on a Ouija board. What I would always feel was not disbelief, but disappointment. My gut told me that spirits were real, but they likely had better things to do than hang around a pack of tweens.

Maybe it’s because I’d like to believe all those weirdos from the 1920s really were shooting ectoplasm out of their mouth during seances and not just soggy cheesecloth, but I admit to feeling that same disappointment while reading certain chapters of “Spook.” Mary Roach chose to focus on a lot of nutty characters in her attempt to find proof of life after death. Does that mean the idea itself is nutty? Perhaps. Or perhaps all the ghosts were too busy hanging around slumber parties to tell Madame Roach what she wanted to know. Therefore, if we never successfully prove the existence of an afterlife, we know who to blame.

Teenage girls.