Chichester : Wiley ( 2007 ) 380pp. £80.00hb ISBN 978-0-470-01507-0 £31.99pb ISBN 978-0-470-01508-7 The stated purpose of this anthology of essays written by an international sample of (mostly) forensic psychologists is to supplement the already existing literature on victims' and witnesses' memories of violent crimes, which have been relatively extensively investigated, with a volume that would, for the first time, provide a comprehensive review of current theory and research on the memories of the perpetrators of those crimes. As such, this volume is a welcome corrective to the, all too frequent, tendency on the part of scientific investigators of the psychology of violent behaviour to pay attention only to the experience of victims and witnesses while ignoring the psychology of perpetrators. The editor is a forensic psychologist affiliated to Stockholm University and the Sundsvall Forensic Psychiatric Hospital. The unifying theme of the book is the attempt to distinguish between malingerers, true amnesiacs (both dissociative or psychogenic, and neurological, such as the amnesia following brain concussions), confabulators, false confessors, and valid reporters of the crime committed. The strength of this book, which is also (as is usually the case) its weakness, is its comprehensiveness – the fact that although every chapter deals in one way or another with the same subject, it approaches that subject from so many different points of view, with so many different audiences in mind, and with so many different, and sometimes contradictory, conclusions reached, that it is difficult to arrive at any clear-cut conclusions by the time one has finished reading it, or to be able to summarise any central thesis as emerging from it. That is a strength of the book insofar as its purpose is to present a comprehensive review of the present state of research on this subject, the wide variety of approaches taken, purposes pursued, and conclusions reached; and it is also, to some extent, an unavoidable limitation of it, since it is grappling with the central epistemological problem of all psychology, including forensic psychology, which is that it is never possible to know for certain what is going on, or has gone on, in another person's mind (let alone one's own). However, at the risk of over-simplifying, one can summarise a few general conclusions on which there appears to be a consensus (though never a unanimous one). A repeated finding is that a substantial minority of perpetrators of violent crimes report amnesia for the crime itself (although not usually for the events leading up to the violent act and the events following it), especially if the crime was homicide, and committed in a state of extreme emotional arousal (rage, jealousy, etc.) toward a victim who was emotionally important to the perpetrator. Also, people who report amnesia for a murder may be at increased risk of committing murder again in the future. Since those who claim amnesia in this way do not generally deny their guilt, and it cannot, in any case, decrease their criminal responsibility as judged by the legal system, these descriptions of amnesia seem at least plausible, if not always (or ever) certain. Amnesia is reported less commonly the more the violence was ‘instrumental’, that is, planned, and goal-directed toward some purpose other than the violence itself, against victims who are of little personal significance to the offender, by an individual with a psychopathic personality. Malingering, of course, also occurs (that is, deliberately making a false claim of amnesia, in an attempt to avoid conviction for a murder), especially in this latter group, but so does false confessing (which may occur under a variety of circumstances), and the forensic psychologist's formidable task, which this book addresses, includes that of developing techniques enabling us to distinguish between the objective truth and both of those forms of distortion of it. One question about which there can be little doubt, however, is that the field of forensic psychology is unquestionably made richer by the appearance of this important book.