Talking with Psychopaths and Savages: A Journey into the Evil Mind by Christopher Berry-Dee

The Blurb

LOOK AROUND YOU, BECAUSE THE PERSON SITTING RIGHT NEXT TO YOU COULD BE A COLD, HEARTLESS MURDERER.

In Talking With Psychopaths and Savages, bestselling author and criminologist Christopher Berry-Dee takes readers deep inside the dark minds of some of the most pitiless and dangerous people alive. Having spent years interviewing imprisoned criminals including notorious serial killers he discovered that the lack of remorse these people showed was in many ways even more terrifying than the crimes they had committed.

Yet in the course of these conversations, the author also had the chance to interview his subjects psychiatrists and, in doing so, uncovered a terrible truth: a monster can be hidden behind a friendly face. Some of these experts, he found, proved to have more in common with their patients than he would ever have expected.

This book examines horrific crimes committed by some of the most remorseless and merciless people ever to have lived. If it reveals a mindset wholly alien to most people, it also, shockingly, demonstrates that some of the people who treat these psychopaths have their own demons.

Talking with Psychopaths and Savages will inevitably shift the reader's view of psychopaths, and in doing so, reveals that horror can be much closer to us than we think.

My Review

Christopher Berry-Dee has been severely criticised by some readers of Talking with Psychopaths and Savages for presenting himself as arrogant, full of self-praise and even accused of being narcissistic. This may well be true, and I sincerely hope the author is not offended by this, he may well agree! But would an unassuming, self-effacing personality have had the success that CBD had in out manipulating the manipulators when extracting vital information from some of the world's most heinous serial offenders when they had nothing to gain by revealing what law-enforcement agencies had failed to do. In this book, we read about his 'fishing' strategy to massage their egos and find a way in. In some cases, he would seek common ground, an interest, which the offender would profess to be 'expert' and use this to peel back onion-like protective layers of false truths, false personas, to get to what the justice system and victims families needed to know. Christopher Berry-Dee is no ordinary psychologist and we need more like him to understand the minds of these predatory people, unlike some psychiatrists who have released murderers deeming them 'unlikely to kill again,' at the cost of the loss of more innocent lives. A praiseworthy, fascinating book that gives insight into the minds of psychopaths and savages and the good and the bad of how legal and healthcare professionals deal with them.