Talking With Psychopaths and Savages - A journey into the evil mind: A chilling study of the most cold-blooded, manipulative people on planet earth

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This is the first book by Christopher Berry-Dee that I read and I am so happy I found him. Being a person interested in true crime, criminology, and so on, not knowing about this author before makes me feel bad and clueless. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone, as I've said if you want to know anything about a serial killer then just Google it, you'll probably find more from the internet than you will in this book and you really don't want to spending time with this author, which is basically all you do while reading it.

I loved that this book covered less well-known serial killers; usually, these books just examine the same few famous serial killers. I was really excited to learn about these killers I didn’t know much about; especially the non-American killers. A noted writer and criminologist, Christopher Berry-Dee's recent books include Talking With Psychopaths and Savages, the UK's bestselling true-crime title of 2017, and Talking With Female Serial Killers. He is the country's No. 1 true-crime author. Talking with Psychopaths and Savages seeks to understand the motivations for what makes a serial killer a killer. Yet, it was not quite what I expected.This book examines horrific crimes committed by some of the most remorseless and merciless people ever to have lived, revealing a mindset wholly alien to most people. This book is laced with an arrogant tone throughout which honestly makes me more uncomfortable than the actual descriptions of the crimes committed. The author brags about his interactions with serial killers and other criminal psychologists, putting himself on a pedestal while expressing a condescending to the readers and those who may wish to get into his line of work. You would think that with his arrogant tone and bragging he at least knows what he is talking about and writes it in a clear and concise manner. That is not the case. He goes off on tangents which lead to nothing and actually take away from the case. He inserts his own opinions which would be fine if they weren't so pretentious. The writing is inconsistent and has a number of errors in spelling and grammar which makes you wonder if anyone actually read over this before publishing. A natural subject for the UK's bestselling true-crime author: a study of people who randomly kill large numbers of others (spree killers), or who set out to do so in specific places or situations (mass killers). Because of the ease of obtaining firearms in the USA, many of these, inevitably, are American, but there have been other recent examples in New Zealand and Norway, while three major mass shootings took place in the UK at Hungerford in 1987 (17 dead, including the killer), Dunblane in 1996 (18, including the killer), and in Cumbria in 2010 (13, including the killer).

I'm laughing at the irony of this man condemning murderers as the "scum of the earth" (how factual) then salivating over killing people and them catching fire in electric chairs. Talking with Psychopaths and Savages - a Journey Into the Evil Mind: A Chilling Study of the Most Cold-Blooded, Manipulative People on Planet EarthThe author has the most irritatingly self-righteous tone I've ever come across, not to mention his syntax and grammar are appalling. Absolutely nothing to do with the title but rather one angry middle aged man's rant about gun control in a country he frequently declares is idiotic and full of 'losers'. There’s no interviews with any criminals in this book at all. All the author ever states about mass murderers or spree killers is who they are and how many people they killed. Also, I don’t need to know that much detail about the guns used? Like, it’s really boring to try and read through what velocity the bullets would fire at from a certain range?

I wasn't expecting to love this book as much as I did. But Christopher Berry-Dee has such a relatable way of writing, and I really felt I was inside his mind and sitting having a chat with him. The flow of this book is awful. Chapters have different killers in the same paragraph so makes it so confusing to form a complete thought about one killer. The fact that most of this book is just blaming gun laws in USA (I’m from England) makes the whole book feel like a it was just to piss off the Americans.This book was very poorly put together, whilst others in the series focused on a particular killer, their psyche and interview (which was what made them interesting!), this failed on all of those fronts. It read like a patchwork of notes that someone strung together, with no real depth of research, which meant there was very little of interest for readers to cling onto. Some of the things in this one were really quite disturbing and it was an eye opener to read about some of the bad guys that I hadn't come across before. One of the main things which I found really annoying, is how the author constantly refers to previous books he has written. I get he is trying to tell the reader that if you found this interesting, you might want to read my other book where I mentioned it too but it comes across as repetitive self promotion.