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I must make a confession. Sometimes, when reviewing books to a deadline I don't read every word. But when I gobble up every word, then I know I am reading a really good one. So it was with Dr Duncan Harding's gripping and enlightening account of his encounters with the criminal mind. Harding is a consultant child and adolescent forensic psychiatrist and has spent the latter part of his career doing in-depth interviews with children accused of crimes and then being called to the witness box to help jurors with their impossible task of sorting the mad from the bad.
Reminiscent of recent bestsellers such as Gwen Adshead's The Devil You Know and Anna Motz’ A Love That Kills in that it contains highly anonymised but evocatively rendered case studies, The Criminal Mind introduces us to, among others, a twelve-year-old girl who has burnt down her home, a private school-educated boy who strangles his aunt in his local park, a gang-corrupted boy who stabs another in the eye on the top of a London bus, and a New Forest pony-obsessed young girl who is the victim of online grooming by a paedophile, but ends up being sentenced as one. In each case, we accompany Dr Harding on his journey to meet them, to hear about their offences, and to listen to his thorny deliberations as he attempts to flay fact from fiction and motive from mood.
A modern-day Sherlock Holmes, in that his powers of observation must miss nothing, if he is to root out a prodromal psychosis here, a Munchausen-by-proxy diagnosis there. While intensely concentrating, Dr Harding must appear unconcerned, lest the objects of his gaze clam up or take too much pleasure in subjecting him to the horror of their actions. It is a tightrope he walks, not just in the room with his patients, but also on Criminal Court witness stands where the future of these children hangs in the balance. The weight of the responsibility he feels to persuade the jury of his hard-won knowledge about what led these children to commit their crimes