Parents Who Kill: Murderers of Newborn, Pre-Teen and Teenage Children has case studies of British, American and European killers and a chapter which offers solutions. It includes exclusive interviews with an internationally recognised psychiatrist, a British crime scene investigator, the editor of a newspaper which covered one of Scotland’s worst family killers and a top American true crime author.

What makes a mother sequentially kill her pre-school children or a father murder his much-loved son in a blitzkrieg attack?  Why would a supposedly loving couple fatally discipline their only child in front of witnesses? Society is baffled by such murders – murders which Parents Who Kill describes and explains.

The book is divided into four sections: Murderous Mothers, Fatal Fathers, Homicidal Couples and Reality Check.

Each chapter in Murderous Mothers looks at a particular type of child-murder, from Tell No One where frightened girls conceal their pregnancy and kill the baby at birth, to Capital Gains where women deliberately suffocate their offspring to collect the insurance money.

Similarly, in Fatal Fathers, there are chapters on everything from family killers (who obliterate their spouse, children and sometimes even their parents or in-laws) to so-called honour killings where a liberal teenage daughter is targeted.

The section on Homicidal Couples includes landmark cases where the woman was charged for failing to protect her child from her violent husband, as well as cases where both parents were equally sadistic, negligent or insane.

The final hope-giving section posits solutions and includes insight from parenting experts.

Parents Who Kill Reviews:

`Parents Who Kill examines twenty four different types of homicidal parent, from tell-no-one young mothers to insurance killers to those who kill by mistake whilst trying to induce illness in their offspring to gain the attention of doctors and nurses. Includes interviews with a top American psychiatrist and a British Crime Scene investigator, explaining the gun residue findings in the Neil Entwistle case.'

Mystery Women

‘Just finished this book. The author, an England-based Scottish writer, has written several books on crime. Her chosen topics so far are: children who kill, women who kill, couples who kill and, now, parents who kill.

In this book, she covers (inter alia) parents who kill in the UK, US, Australia and France and looks at every issue from the abused child becoming an abuser to honour killings to mercy killings to score-settling to psychosis to neglect.

She isn't Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Lawrence Schiller or Brian Masters but she is at least comparable to Ann Rule.

Anyway, it's a dark, disturbing book which at the very least adds to the debate on parents who kill.

Websleuth.com

Now I know Carol best as a writer of spine-tingling crime novels such as Shrouded and Sob Story but she is probably more widely known for her work in the True Crime field, which I admit scares the hell out of me more than her fiction does.

As usual, Carol manages to get some amazing interviews and casts her usual compassionate eye on a subject which in less caring hands would be easily sensationalised. This is a serious case history of infanticide, surely the most incomprehensible of crimes, rather than the screaming tabloid headlines and a worthy study of an awful subject.

Mike Ripley, Shots