Carol Anne Davis sets out to destroy the myth that the only time women and serial killers get together is when women are the victims. This has been a fairly widespread belief for a long time, and indeed it's hard to conjure up a picture of a woman when you think of a serial killer. Those few women who have entered public consciousness as the worst kind of murderer - Myra Hindley and Rose West - have always been seen to be working in conjunction with a man. It's no surprise than in these cases it is argued that it these women are also victims - they killed but only because they had been perverted or coerced by their more dominant male partners.
Carol Anne Davis does a good job of profiling 12 cases of female serial killers. She looks at cases other than Hindley's and West's, cases where there was no male partner, cases where there was a lesbian relationship or no relationship at all.
Some of these make for chilling reading, particularly in cases where women have taken pleasure in the torture and murder of children. It seems so against nature that we recoil even more than when the same crimes are committed by men.
While Davis presents her case dispassionately, at time the sheer weight of material forces her to write in a brief, spare style that doesn't sit naturally with her talents as a novelist. Fewer cases handled in more detail might have been a better plan, but I suspect that might have been seen as distracting from her argument.
Are there differences between male and female serial killers? The answer is a hesitant yes, in that the sexual element is clearly more pronounced in the male of the species. However a damaged childhood seems to be common in both. How this childhood effects the brain/psyche is clearly an important area to research, though of course it's outside the scope of this book.
If you're interested in crime and criminals, then this makes for an interesting read.
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