The Wicked Boy: A Historical True Crime Book about a child murderer.

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.

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.