Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's Homicide is a lengthy, scholarly examination of the topic of people killing each other. As the authors state in their introductory remarks,
Killing one's antagonist is the ultimate conflict resolution technique, and our ancestors discovered it long before they were people. Homicide is a life-and-death issue to the protagonists, of course, but it is also profoundly interesting to those not immediately involved (p. ix).
The justification for writing the present volume is to conduct and "exercise in 'evolutionary psychology': the attempt to understand normal social motives as products of the process of evolution by natural selection" (p. ix).
According to the authors, their specialization in the area of homicide is the result of some eight years of research into "conflicts that were both genuine and severe. Murders obviously filled the bill on both counts . . ." (p. x). Specifically, while research had previously been done by "sociologists seeking structural explanations for variable rates" and psychiatrists had examined individual homicides "seeking syndromes" (p. x), there had not been substantial research into homicides "in the light of any sort of theory of interpersonal conflict" (p. x).
It is precisely the distribution of "victim-killer" and "killer-victim" relationships (familial or not, age disparities, ethnic, etc.) which had not been given much prior attention that piqued the authors' attention. Their examination is principally centered in the United States, but data available from England, Australia, Iceland, Belgium, and elsewhere finds its way into the text also.
The authors contend that homicide is a "heterogeneous class of acts" (p. 12), and requires a variety of analyses in order to distinguish between the different categories they subsequently identify. Divided into a dozen chapters, the text is logically bound together across a diverse cross-section of to...