What exactly does a forensic psychiatrist do?
Forensic psychiatry is the study of the criminal mind. Although we employ high technology such as MRI scans of the brain, our basic tool is the interview. People who aren’t professional interviewers don’t realize that the interview of someone who’s committed a crime involves as much art and science as the examination of the crime scene itself. It’s a blink; an abrupt change of topic; the movement of a hand; the tempo of breathing; the killer’s smirk. The detection of lying is as much a matter of expertise as DNA typing. Quotes on the cover of your book talk about a new kind of thriller. How so? The Interview Room is a crime thriller based on an entirely new kind of clue. We’ve come a long way from Sherlock Holmes and the dog that didn‘t bark to the typing of a suspect’s DNA from a fingerprint left at the crime scene, but in all this time the psychological dimension of crime detection has been largely neglected—even though the interrogation of the suspect remains the cornerstone of all
