Kinesics for beginners
- Published: 12/12/2008 at 12:00 AM
- Newspaper section: Realtime
The Sleeping Doll by Jeffery Deaver 531 pp, 2008 Hodder paperback Available at Asia Books and leading book stores, 350 baht
There's nary a crime fiction book in which chapters aren't devoted to characters being questioned at home or the station house, as witnesses or suspects, by the police. Playing good cop-bad cop, the point of the exercise is to rattle them into admitting a secret, or even confessing. Whether or not the authors had backgrounds in the criminal justice system or did research, those chapters are remarkably similar. How different can the questions and answers be, even the intimidation and threats in the asking, evasiveness and declarations of innocence in the replies? There are polygraphs, yet out of favour because they can be beaten.
However something we've all been doing naturally is becoming systematised, turned into a branch of psychology. The layman knows it as body language. Not snazzy enough. Meaning the same, the highfalutin term is kinesics. The growing belief is that one versed in it - via lectures, classes, texts by "experts" - can detect falsehoods by expressions and gestures during interviews and interrogations.
The way a person blinks, sweats, looks or doesn't look you in the eye, tone of voice, admits to a misdemeanour to hide a felony, cries or doesn't cry, displays or keeps back stress, and so on, tell more about guilt than what he or she says. Agent Kathryn Dance, Jeffery Deaver's latest literary creation, is at the top of the kinesics field.
She is with the CBI (California Bureau of Investigation), not part of the FBI but occasionally working with it. It has no jurisdiction outside the state. A widow with two pre-teenage children, close to her parents, she's had a few romances, which her son and daughter put a damper on. Then again, could FBI special agent Winston Kellogg be Mr Right?
The villain of the piece is Daniel Pell, whose role model is Charles Manson. Like him, he has a cult of women in what he calls his Family. Though torturing and killing on his own, the women (runaways he picked up) robotically follow his orders. Arrested after murdering a family, they help him escape. He prides himself on targeting the relatives of his real and imagined enemies.
There can be no question that Dance is out to get him. What Pell doesn't realise is that he has an even more formidable foe. By the time he does, in the penultimate chapter, his cold-bloodedness doesn't measure up to his worst nightmares. It remains for our heroine to sort out the pieces. At one point she seeks advice from another of the author's literary creations, quadriplegic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme in the Big Apple.
Deaver's 25th novel makes much of kinesics. What troubles this reviewer is that incompetents will pretend to be knowledgeable and use it to analyse people they know or just met. Alas, it can't be restricted to those who conscientiously studied it. Read The Sleeping Doll if you seriously want to look into it.
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