Items related to Picking up the Pieces
The extraordinary and fascinating new book by the author of the award-winning bestseller The Jigsaw Man
Forensic psychologist Paul Britton can 'walk through the minds' of those who murder, rape, torture, extort and kidnap. He can see the world through their eyes and know what they're thinking. That is why the police have called on him to help with many high-profile criminal investigations and catch those responsible.
How does he do it? Paul Britton's newest book, Picking Up the Pieces, reveals the psychological and forensic foundations upon which he has based his expertise. It is a remarkable journey into the darkest recesses of the human mind. From top security prisons and mental hospitals to ordinary outpatients' clinics, Britton introduces us to his clinical and forensic work. A man turns into a werewolf at four o'clock every afternoon. Another has built an electric chair in his basement to kill his father. A woman accepts the blame for abusing her child when she had nothing to do with it. How can they be helped? When Britton so accurately profiled the child killers of Jamie Bulger in Liverpool, or told police the true nature of Frederick and Rosemary West, he could do so because he had treated disturbed children and confronted sadistic sexual murderers in his consulting room.
For twenty-five years Britton has interviewed, assessed and treated people with damaged or broken minds. Some were responsible for terrible crimes, others were stopped before it was too late. The answers aren't hidden at bloody crime scenes or in the post-mortem photographs. Instead, the truth is often locked away within someone's mind or deep in their past.
Picking Up the Pieces is not a sequel to Britton's award-winning autobiography The Jigsaw Man, but a companion volume that shows the heart of his work and the knowledge that underpins his conclusions.
It is a unique and revealing book that will fascinate and provoke discussion.
Paul Britton was born in 1946. Following degrees obtained in psychology from Warwick and Sheffield universities, he has spent the last twenty years working as a consultant clinical and forensic psychologist. He has advised the Association of Chief Police Officers' Crime Committee on offender profiling for many years and currently teaches postgraduates in clinical and forensic psychology. He is married with two children. Paul Britton is the author of Picking Up the Pieces and The Jigsaw Man, which won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award for Non-Fiction.
Forensic psychologist Paul Britton can 'walk through the minds' of those who murder, rape, torture, extort and kidnap. He can see the world through their eyes and know what they're thinking. That is why the police have called on him to help with many high-profile criminal investigations and catch those responsible.
How does he do it? Paul Britton's newest book, Picking Up the Pieces, reveals the psychological and forensic foundations upon which he has based his expertise. It is a remarkable journey into the darkest recesses of the human mind. From top security prisons and mental hospitals to ordinary outpatients' clinics, Britton introduces us to his clinical and forensic work. A man turns into a werewolf at four o'clock every afternoon. Another has built an electric chair in his basement to kill his father. A woman accepts the blame for abusing her child when she had nothing to do with it. How can they be helped? When Britton so accurately profiled the child killers of Jamie Bulger in Liverpool, or told police the true nature of Frederick and Rosemary West, he could do so because he had treated disturbed children and confronted sadistic sexual murderers in his consulting room.
For twenty-five years Britton has interviewed, assessed and treated people with damaged or broken minds. Some were responsible for terrible crimes, others were stopped before it was too late. The answers aren't hidden at bloody crime scenes or in the post-mortem photographs. Instead, the truth is often locked away within someone's mind or deep in their past.
Picking Up the Pieces is not a sequel to Britton's award-winning autobiography The Jigsaw Man, but a companion volume that shows the heart of his work and the knowledge that underpins his conclusions.
It is a unique and revealing book that will fascinate and provoke discussion.
Paul Britton was born in 1946. Following degrees obtained in psychology from Warwick and Sheffield universities, he has spent the last twenty years working as a consultant clinical and forensic psychologist. He has advised the Association of Chief Police Officers' Crime Committee on offender profiling for many years and currently teaches postgraduates in clinical and forensic psychology. He is married with two children. Paul Britton is the author of Picking Up the Pieces and The Jigsaw Man, which won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award for Non-Fiction.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review:
It's all the fault of Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps not the first detective novels (William Godwin's Caleb Williams, according to Julian Symons in Bloody Murder, or more popularly The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins), the tales of the Baker Street sleuth nonetheless presented the first accounts of psychological profiling, characteristically drawing upon the faintest of clues. Away from one fictional figure, forensic psychologist Paul Britton was the inspiration for another, television's Cracker. Britton had been involved in the conviction of murderer Paul Bostock in 1979, now acknowledged as the first person to have been caught and convicted using psychological analysis, and he has been consulted on more than 100 subsequent cases. Picking Up the Pieces, the follow-up to The Jigsaw Man, parades a rogues' gallery of cases from his clinical casebook, as disparate and anguished as one might imagine: a man who electrocutes rabbits in place of his abusive father in a home-made electric chair; a woman possessed, supposedly after a ouija board encounter; Colin Ireland, the serial gay killer; various stalkers and rapists; and even his own Wolf-Man, like Dr Freud (though psychoanalysis barely gets a mention), who turns into a werewolf each day at 4pm. Britton's work is controversial--he was involved with the arrest of Colin Stagg for the horrific murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in 1992, for which Stagg is considering legal action for entrapment--but when applied properly, amounts to little more than old-fashioned detective work, painstakingly worked through. The writing is sleekly episodic, wrapped around his own professional life, and while at times the neo-fictional dialogue can seem a little polished ("They used the garden because the house is full" is his response to an enquiry as to why the Wests buried bodies in the back-garden), the insights offered are genuinely interesting, and responsibly explained. And his conclusion makes grim reading: he is seeing more cases of institutionalised abuse than ever. Uncomfortably gripping. --David Vincent
Review:
"Britton has done hugely important work that saves lives. He is fascinating. His book is compelling" (The Sunday Times)
"A unique understanding of the dark side of the human condition" (Red)
"Precise, considered, methodical. His skill is to go beyond the guise, to understand and inhabit the psychopathic mind" (Independent)
"A unique understanding of the dark side of the human condition" (Red)
"Precise, considered, methodical. His skill is to go beyond the guise, to understand and inhabit the psychopathic mind" (Independent)
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBantam Press
- Publication date2000
- ISBN 10 0552209953
- ISBN 13 9780552209953
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages464
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