The Coombs case indeed throws up a mirror to our apparently more modern age, where we consider ourselves to have more understanding. The Wicked Boy however does not lead one to the satisfactory conclusion that we would react differently now-a-days because we are so much more knowledgeable and clever. Instead it shows us that despite the great advances we've made both socially and in technology, once you scratch the surface the human reaction to children committing murder is the same tumultuous mix of shock, horror, pity, and disbelief, accompanied by the kind of wild blame seeking and judgement that speaks more of calming anxiety than the search for true understanding.
Unheard. The Fred and Rose West Tapes: A True Crime Podcast
The human centre Sounes gives us is much needed to provide depth, tone and heart. If we take only one approach, analysis without heart, or heart without analysis, we risk losing something important, the je ne sais quo, of what was happening in Gloucester and the terrible chemistry between Fred and Rose.
Baby X: A True Crime Book
In the content creating world which is bent towards crime, murder is always considered the worst. Most cultures and civilisations have always done so, although some may disagree with the concept of all murders being bad, given how throughout history there have always been some lives considered less. However, there is genearlly agreement that murder …
HellSans: A thriller about disability by Ever Dundas
It is not just the effects on the soul that Dundass has got right, it's also the othering and dislike of disability from society. At the heart of HellSans is the unspoken question that all those with disability come to ask themselves sooner or later "Is it me who is disabled, or is the real disability societies inability to cope with differnece."
The Cruelty: A Child Unclaimed. A podcast unravelling one of Scotland’s best known mysteries.
This is not the only time we see this behaviour, as wherever the cold clamy hand of colonialisim has touched, we find "experiments" of this sort, from the forced assimilation of Australian Aboriginals, to cutting First Nations People from their land and placing their children in residential school, we see this pattern repeated across history and continents.
Better the Blood: A Crime Fiction Book set in New Zealand
The surface question of this book is "Who is killing these people?" but as a book of layers, readers who choose to dig down further find other questions, many of which will be uncomfortable. Like it's antipodean counterpart, Dust off the Bones, we are seeing an emergence in crime fiction of narrative which deeply engages with crime. Not just the crime that propels a reader to turn the page to find out who dun it. Rather crime that is rooted in great injustices, crimes of nations and states, crimes for which no one person can be jailed, so we can easily say justice is done and move on. Crimes which are so large, that they ripple throughout history, and on the level of time are still present, happening and, ongoing, before our very eyes.
Can I Tell You A Secret? A True Crime Podcast about cyber stalking
Where Sirin Kale, the reporter on Can I Tell You A Secret really excells is in her nuanced and sensative treatment of Hardy's autisim. As a nuro-diverse person myself I am often aware of the misconceptions and two dimensional views many nuro-typicals can hold about what a nuro-diverse diagnosis does or does not mean. Kale however goes out of her way to make sure Hardy's autisim is neither an excuse, nor discounted when it comes to his actions, but rather treated as a factor that is worth uderstanding, especially when it comes to rehabilitation.
The Butcher and The Wren: A Crime Fiction Book by Alaina Urquhart
What Urquhart does do though is give us a more rounded an believable serial killer for our protagonist to fight. She leaves aside the grandising of the serial killer as some kind of terrible, yet infalible not quite human figuer in the shadows, an inversion of the great man fallacy, and instead show us someone who is not as clever as he thinks, or wishes to be.
His Bloody Project: A Crime Fiction Book Set in Wester Ross
Recently while watching the trailer for the new Game of Thrones spin off House of the Dragon I casually remarked to my daughter that I was brought up in an area called Easter Ross. She immediately thought I was making it up, even though I am nothing but 100% serious all the time, and I …
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The Macabre Tale of John Horwood: A True Crime Podcast
It's a tale as old as time. Boy grows up beside girl. Boy falls for girl. Boy shoots his shot. Girl rejects boy. Boy unleashes a campaign of harassment, including death threats, against the girl. As such the 200 year old tale of Eliza Bolsom's death in 1821, shows how stalking, harassment and violence has always been interlinked.