The Reid Technique
I've been meaning to read a book written by Jo Nesbø for quite some time now (my experience with Scandanavian crime fiction up until this point has been limited to Stiegg Larson and Peter Wahloo). The local library always seems to have a few of Jo Nesbø's books available on the shelf. I finally checked one of his books out last week: Headhunters. My expectations for the book were pretty high. After all, the book was published by Vintage Crime / Black Lizard.
The novel is about an executive recruiter and fine art thief who meets the perfect candidate for a CEO position. The candidate also just so happens to have a long lost painting of Rubens which could solve all of the protagonist's financial problems.
The book was an enjoyable read but I found myself bored with the plot about halfway through the book. The most compelling part of the book for me was the protagonist's use of an FBI interrogation technique during recruitment interviews for corporate jobs. The protagonist, Roger Brown, describes the technique as follows:
It has been said that when the American police investigators Inbau, Reid and Buckley published Criminal Interrogation and Confessions in 1962, they laid the foundations for what have since become the prevailing interview techniques in the Western world. The truth is, of course that the techniques prevailed long before then, that Inbaud, Reid ad Buchkley's nine-step model merely summarized the FBI's hundred-year experience of extracting confessions from suspects. The method has shown itself to be enormously effective, on both the guilty and the innocent. After DNA technology made it possible for old cases to be re-examined, hundreds of people were found to have been wrongly imprisoned in the USA alone. Around a quarter of these wrongful convictions were based on confessions extracted by the nine-step model. That says everything about what a fantastic tool it is.
Any casual television viewer is familiar with this technique (e.g. see any episode of the Law & Order series). Before reading this book, I would not have expected for this technique to be used in situations outside a police precinct (e.g. corporate investigations). I'm glad I read Headhunters because it prompted me to formally read about this ubiquitous interrogation technique. During my reading I came across an article in the New Yorker that has a thorough discussion of the history and controversies surrounding the technique (see The Interview: Do police interrogation techniques produce false confessions?).