Berry-Dee uses much of it to pimp his other works, with the rest consisting of awkwardly prosaic lists of names and dates, and name/age/eye colour/hair colour descriptions of every individual. the random male killers he'd add in just because he felt like it even though he's writing a book on FEMALE killers was fun This is a rather harrowing read looking at case study of some of the most awful serial killers to have existed. The interviews raise some important questions about whether these people are sane, how they came to commit this crimes and in some cases, whether they actually committed these crimes or did someone else do it and get away with it.

He seems to think self promoting his other works every other chapter or so is acceptable. While I’m sure this is a great achievement I don’t need to read for the umpteenth time how your book “Monster” was then adapted into a feature film starring Charlize Theron, name drop included each and every time. This book is said to be a book where the author is talking with serial killers but in my opinion this book isn’t about talking with serial killer as much as it was talking about the serial killers. It's not only the killers who receive this treatment, however. Female witnesses are "plump" or "graying" and the wives of jury members are "plain". Quite what a jury member's wife has to do with the murderers who are the supposed topic of this book I'm not too sure... but then again I'm also not sure not how Berry-Dee knows they were plain given that this particular trial happened in the '60s, but there we have it.Alice Johnson, a somewhat dim-witted, plain woman in her 30s fell for him, and this naive and gullible cleaning woman with few friends thought she'd met a hard-working, decent man." - Yes Christopher, because I'm sure you've never been wrong about a person in your entire life, and surely everybody was on the receiving end of well-intentioned upbringing and education to shield them from predators and con-artists. Definitely. If he is as much of an expert when it comes to serial killers and psychopaths as he claims he is, he would surely be the first one to remind us of how cunning and manipulative these individuals can be, and about how they can sometimes portray the loving husband and father for decades, and credibly so, before their mask slips. But apparently, this victim didn't deserve that little reminder. I think we are all very well-aware of the fact that many male writers seem to have trouble writing female characters. However, Berry-Dee takes this to a completly new level by apparently being unable to resist the urge to describe the physical appearance of EVERY SINGLE FEMALE HUMAN BEING mentioned in the book in a quite frankly disgusting manner. I do not understand how it is relevant to the story that a certain murderer used to have a “very shapely body” in the past but now is nothing more than “ugly and overweight”. Yeah, I know that most women in the book were or still are terrible people who did terrible things – but there is still no need to diminish their worth as a human being to how pleasing they are to the eye. Personally, I just don’t need to know the bust size of someone to determine whether their killing spree was morally questionable or not. All of this is in addition to repeatedly referring to all of womankind as “the fairer sex” as well as insisting that all women are naturally nurturing and motherly, discreetly suggesting that if you are not, there is something wrong with you.

Moving on to the foreword and introductory chapters. The foreword seems to hold very little relevance to the content of the book, discussing his time visiting a women's prison in Russia and his thoughts on the prison; many of which are discussing how inmates in UK prisons shouldn't have the right to complain compared to the conditions of those in Sablino Prison, Russia. This strikes me as a strange point to take away, if you saw people living in extremely poor conditions, while under the care of the state, that would bring you to consider how much human rights mean when they deem it acceptable to retract them as punishment. Instead of questioning how the prison systems treat inmates, he came to the conclusion that those in a UK prison should have no right to complain - even though the UK prison system is also uniquely flawed. This wasn´t what I expected and, to be honest, it was a bit of a disappointment. It reminded me of those free annual-sized books they used to do for a pound (and maybe still do) with titles like "The Most Evil People In History" or "True Crime".This is my first non-fiction, documentary read for years and I have to admit the book is such an 'enlightenment' albeit its dwellings into the darkest minds and their 'modus operandi' which are really disturbing. As a book about real life serial killers, the stories (mostly) are very interesting and the author clearly has a substantial amount of information about them which makes for an interesting read. At times though this book was a struggle to read with the countless spelling and grammatical errors clearly missed by the publishers which almost made me give the book 2 stars. If you are a big true crime fan like myself, you will find this a fascinating read, but at the same time hard to swallow as it seems to be all about men killing women which is a difficult read for, well, a woman. The killers' pursuit of horror and violence is described through the unique audiotape and videotape interviews which Berry-Dee conducted, deep inside the bowels of some of the world's toughest prisons.