Of the 18 men and women interviewed for this book, all but two were convicted of, murder and one had even been strapped into the electric chair just before his reprieve came. As might be expected, they are a mixed lot they include a former Vietnam war hero who killed a woman in cold blood, a former sailor who had killed a man in a tavern brawl, a black woman who had stabbed her estranged husband, another woman, daughter of a retired professor of English, who had shot her troublesome lover to get rid of him (they made love first). Some of these people are plainly victims of circumstances, others - as they admit themselves - seem innately and naturally bad, others again panicked under immediate pressures into acts of ultra-violence, while some simply drifted into "bad company and went downhill from there on. In general, they sound an ordinary enough cross-section of humanity, rather than moral monsters or psychopaths, and also reasonably articulate on the whole - to what extent, one wonders, were they selected for their willingness or ability to talk?