Title: Lone Wolf

Author/Artist: Pan Pantziarka

Publisher: Virgin

Media: Book

Reviewer: Simon Whitechapel

I’m not interested in guns and I’ve always thought spree killers were the least interesting kind of psychopath, so this book wasn't preaching to the converted. Having read it, I can't say I’m one of the faithful yet but I think I’ve come as I close as I can to understanding what one of these massacres is like short of actually being caught up in the real thing.

And understanding that was a disturbing thing. Spilled brains and strewn viscera are not as unusual in modern life as we might suppose, because car-crashes supply copious quantities of them every day, but the difference with a spree killer is that he supplies them carefully, calculatedly, and purposefully, sometimes over hours or days. The description here of the Australian spree-killer Martin Bryant turning a peaceful Tasmanian town into something out of the last days of Berlin is something that will stay with me:

"Finishing his meal, he picked up his tennis bag and walked back inside the café, still fairly busy serving lunches and cold drinks." Moments later he's removed an "AR15 semi-automatic assault rifle" from the bag, shot one Chinese-Malay tourist through the neck, and blown another's head off, starting as he means to go on for the next few hours. There's an incongruity about the setting that increases the power and horror of the violent deaths: ordinary people aren't supposed to die like this, but they have and will continue to do so.

Pantziarka looks at seven cases in detail and gives an overview of several more, writing in a clear, precise, unemotional prose that's rare in true crime studies. He has his own ideas about what should and should not be done about spree killers but presents them in a way that allows readers to make up their own minds. The book's also useful for its coverage of extreme right-wing politics in the United States, where most of these crimes have taken place and where many of the criminals have been associated with extreme right-wing parties.

Those are the pluses of the book: the minuses, for me, were the tantalizing refusal to follow up some of the more interesting facts dropped into the story – the conspiracy theories surrounding Martin Bryant's murder spree in Tasmania, for example – and the lack of historical and anthropological context. I think most books on spree-killers must mention the Malay phenomenon of "running amok", but most that do, like Lone Wolf, do little more than that. It would be interesting to know more and to know how far this type of crime extends through history and different cultures. Maybe in a later edition?