Understanding Homicide

Understanding Homicide is a comprehensive and challenging text unravelling the phenomenon of homicide. The author combines original analysis with a lucid overview of the key theories and debates in the study of homicide and violence. In introducing the broad spectrum of different features, aspects and forms of homicide, Fiona Brookman examines its patterns and trends, how it may be explained, its investigation and how it may be prevented. The book is unique in its focus, coverage, and style and bridges a major gap in criminological literature. While focused in several respects upon the UK experience of homicide, the text necessarily draws upon and makes a significant contribution to international literature, research and debate.

This comprehensive and challenging text unravels the phenomenon of homicide. In introducing the broad spectrum of different features, aspects and forms of homicide, Fiona Brookman examines its patterns and trends, how it may be explained, its investigation and how it may be prevented.

In this engaging and accessible book, Brookman draws upon several decades of her own research on homicide and violence, including ethnographic research on homicide investigation in the UK and USA and interviews with violent offenders, in order to unravel the characteristics and causes of homicide, how police and forensic scientists investigate it and how it can be prevented. Synthesising bespoke new analysis of the Home Office Homicide Index with case studies of homicides and international debate and literature, this comprehensive textbook will be a valuable resource for students studying homicide, violence, its investigation and responses to it, as well as researchers and practitioners interested in homicide and violence.

This book offers a comprehensive understanding of sexual homicide. It includes a thorough survey of offender classifications, and analyses current theoretical explanations and understandings of sexual homicide from a criminological perspective. It proposes an important new integrated theoretical understanding of sexual homicide offenders.

Echoing Durkheim's Suicide, this book focuses on one important phenomenon to explain larger currents in American society. Leonard Beeghley examines the historical and cross-national dimensions of homicides and evaluates previous attempts to explain it. He finds the sources of America's murder rate in the greater availability of guns, the expansion of illegal drug markets, greater racial discrimination, more exposure to violence, and sharper economic inequalities. He deftly blends the evidence related to each of these factors into a well-reasoned sociological analysis of the nature of American society.

The human race spends a disproportionate amount of attention, money, and expertise in solving, trying, and reporting homicides, as compared to other social problems. The public avidly consumes accounts of real-life homicide cases, and murder fiction is more popular still. Nevertheless, we have only the most rudimentary scientific understanding of who is likely to kill whom and why. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson apply contemporary evolutionary theory to analysis of human motives and perceptions of self-interest, considering where and why individual interests conflict, using well-documented murder cases. This book attempts to understand normal social motives in murder as products of the process of evolution by natural selection. They note that the implications for psychology are many and profound, touching on such matters as parental affection and rejection, sibling rivalry, sex differences in interests and inclinations, social comparison and achievement motives, our sense of justice, lifespan developmental changes in attitudes, and the phenomenology of the self. This is the first volume of its kind to analyze homicides in the light of a theory of interpersonal conflict. Before this study, no one had compared an observed distribution of victim-killer relationships to "expected" distribution, nor asked about the patterns of killer-victim age disparities in familial killings. This evolutionary psychological approach affords a deeper view and understanding of homicidal violence.

In this engaging and accessible book, Brookman draws upon several decades of her own research on homicide and violence, including ethnographic research on homicide investigation in the UK and USA and interviews with violent offenders, in order to unravel the characteristics and causes of homicide, how police and forensic scientists investigate it and how it can be prevented. Synthesising bespoke new analysis of the Home Office Homicide Index with case studies of homicides and international debate and literature, this comprehensive textbook will be a valuable resource for students studying homicide, violence, its investigation and responses to it, as well as researchers and practitioners interested in homicide and violence.

"he Murder Book offers broader and deeper coverage of the theoretical explanations for homicide than competitors. Discussions of the extraordinary murders featured in the popular texts on the market are included while providing a more extensive and realistic view of homicide by also examining the more ordinary homicides that occur every day. Unlike existing texts, The Murder Book also present details about how homicide cases are worked and how they are dealt with in the courts, thus providing a more complete treatment of homicide than is currently available, appealing to those who want a broader and mare rigorous academic treatment of homicide that goes beyond what students learn through popular media presentations on murder"--