Understanding Homicide: A Critical Introduction

Why do people kill? How is homicide investigated? What are the patterns and characteristics of UK homicide? How can it be prevented?

Understanding Homicide is a comprehensive and challenging text unravelling the phenomenon of homicide. The author combines original analysis with a lucid overview of the key theories and debates in the study of homicide and violence. In introducing the broad spectrum of different features, aspects and forms of homicide, Fiona Brookman examines its patterns and trends, how it may be explained, its investigation and how it may be prevented.

Areas covered include:

• The killing of children
• Multiple homicide (including serial and mass murder, terrorism and corporate homicide)
• Domestic homicide
• Female killers
• Homicide amongst men

The book is unique in its focus, coverage, and style and bridges a major gap in criminological literature. While focused in several respects upon the UK experience of homicide, the text necessarily draws upon and makes a significant contribution to international literature, research and debate.

The text has been written in a style that will be accessible to a wide audience and assumes no prior knowledge. Features to aide the student include study tasks, review questions and annotated suggested further reading, including internet resources.

Understanding Homicide is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of criminology, criminal justice, psychology,sociology and forensics. It will also be invaluable to academics, researchers and practitioners interested in the phenomenon of homicide and the broader issue of violence.

Fiona Brookman is Professor of Criminology at the University of South Wales, UK. She obtained her PhD from Cardiff University in 2000 and has, since then, researched and published mainly in the fields of homicide, violence and policing.  Using qualitative research methods, her research focuses on the causes of homicide and violence, narratives of violence and the investigation and prevention of homicide. She has extensive experience of conducting in-depth interviews with violent offenders, detectives and forensic scientists, and of shadowing homicide detectives (in Britain and America).  She recently completely a four-year ethnographic study of the role of science and technology in British homicide investigations, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Fiona is Director of the Criminal Investigation Research Network (CIRN) and was Visiting Professor at American University, Washington DC in 2012. She advises the Home Office on serious violence policy and is a member of the National Police Chiefs’ Council Transforming Digital Forensics Working Group.
Fiona has over 70 publications including research papers in international journals and numerous chapters in edited collections, including The Oxford Handbook of Offender Decision Making (Oxford: 2017), Ethnography in Criminology (Springer: 2017), the Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: 2012), In Their Own Words (Oxford: 2013), Narrative Criminology (New York: 2015) and The Handbook of Qualitative Criminology (Routledge: 2015).  She edited, with Mike Maguire and Ed Maguire, the Handbook of Homicide (Wiley: 2017).