Customer Reviews

When Kids Kill: Shocking Crimes of Lost Innocence (Virgin True Crime)

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Although informative, this book is bland. It's hard to get through more than a couple of chapters at a time. In fact, I skipped some altogether (although I later tried to re-read it with the same results). I found the first part of the book (especially the Jamie Bulger case) a lot more interesting than the second half.

The first chapter of this book leads you to believe it is going to be a sociological and psychological look into why young people manage to bring themselves to commit murder. However, little is observed or investigated, psychologically or sociologically, into the reasons why these kids were killing people. While the book on a whole is interesting, it lacks any flow and is very dry reading. There were sections of certain chapters that tended to get "long-winded" and should have been eliminated during editing. Other chapters quickly flew over the results or trauma of the events of the deaths. Most of the instances in this book take place in the U.K. and short of reading papers from there, an average American has probably never heard of these criminal cases causing a further lack of connection.

Overall, it's a mediocre book but could be used for a psychology class reasearch paper. I found the book to be a slow read yet still interesting enough to finish it.