Book title: Interrogating the Criminal Mind: Means, Motives and Mistakes
Author: Chioma Okezie-Okeh
Pages: 89
Crime reports are usually oversimplified: summarised recounts of criminal acts, highlights of police efforts, and basic statistics of criminals and casualties.
As such, the quick-read reportage is, more often than not, flat and easily forgotten.
That is why crime stories, no matter how shocking, soon ‘blow away.’ They are but an appetizer to the smorgasbord of political and economic news items that take prominence from cover headlines to back-page opinions.
The superficial treatment of this genre of news as fillers leaves a big vacuum in public knowledge about the minds and motivations of criminals.
That is the anomaly that the author of Interrogating the Criminal Mind: Means, Motives and Mistakes tries to correct.
Chioma Okezie-Okeh’s collection of carefully curated stories digs deep into the psychology of criminals who commit heinous crimes and dissects their motives to show the reader the warped thought process in the dark crevices of their minds.
The author profiles a mixed grill of crimes and criminals, ranging from psychopaths to moral morons, from atavistic to opportunist criminals, and from coldblooded murders to crimes of passion.
The kaleidoscope of crime in the 10-chapter book covers a broad spectrum of criminalities in the country.
The writing style is fastidious, refreshing and incisive.
Here is the X-factor: rather than being a passive reader, the author makes the reader a third party to the interaction between criminals and detectives. She makes us witness the crime-solving process, casting us in the role of Dr Watson to the Sherlock Holmes detectives unravelling the crime thread.
Okezie-Okeh has made her mark as an uber-resourceful crime reporter who, for over 15 years, served the readers of The Sun newspaper some of the most sensational crime stories of the decade.
Now, she has returned with a second serving of enriched stories, written in a breezy, mixed narrative style that makes reading pleasurable.
Interrogating the Criminal Mind is worth its weight in gold: a proof of the author’s metier; a testament to her capability as an authority in crime and policing matters; a totem of the crime beat.
The merit of the book as a compendium of unusual crimes and criminals in Nigeria is glaring.
But it bears repeating that while it is an open aperture on the psychology of criminals, Interrogating the Criminal Mind is also a manual on the methodology of police work and a dictum to the reading public that ‘crime does not pay.’
As a first book, the author does a decent job as a writer. Once written as plain reports, the stories are excellently written as well-fleshed, three-dimensional thrillers with depth and diversity and a general plot that focuses on motives and mistakes.
Unlike the jaded, flat and ‘antiseptic’ reports in the newspaper, Okezie-Okeh’s stories are purposely re-crafted to be unforgettable.
After an enjoyable reading of the book, the characters—unrepentant convicts, psychopaths, deceitful clerics, cold-blooded killers, moral morons, hustling desperadoes and their ilks—occupy your thoughts, prodding you for silent reflections.
It is instructive to note that even while she tries to keep the shadows of law enforcement out of the narratives, you can’t help but feel the police factor as the reader joins the detectives to seek a way out of the labyrinth of crime.
