Have you read anything by John Douglas? He is the FBI profiler that Thomas Harris based Jack Crawford on.
I really enjoyed “The Cases that Haunt Us” – in it he analyzes famous historical murders like Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, the Zodiac Killer, etc. and uses modern investigative techniques to posit a new suspect. Really interesting!
I read Mindhunter ages ago, I think around the time it first came out in paperback, maybe a little after. I thought he had some interesting insights into a couple of areas that people don’t touch on very often. There’s a lot of debate these days about how much profiling is really psychology and how much is essentially on the level of horoscope-casting, but he’s a very compelling writer even outside of his thoughts specific to psychological profiles. I’ll have to have a look at The Cases That Haunt Us.
I haven’t yet read The Cases That Haunt Us (though it is very much on my ‘to read one day’ list) but I’d like to add a rec for The Murder Room by Michael Capuzzo, which focuses on the work and cases of an exclusive cold case sleuthing club made up of retired professionals, with heavy attention paid to its three keystone members – a profiler, a sculptor who reconstructs faces, and a polygraph operator. It’s a genuinely interesting piece of storytelling, written in the style of a magazine feature stretched out to book length, and there’s a fair amount of delving into that line where science and measurable fact meets intuition. Whether or not you believe in their theories or methods (they often argued amongst themselves about cases and conclusions drawn) it’s a captivating biography of three men who between them put away a lot of bad people and helped return many victims to their families.
This is Phryne Fisher. She’s a daring forty-something woman living in Australia during the 1920s with enough money to live it up and a wardrobe that’ll make you cry.
She decides she’s going to become a private detective, so she does. She has a pearl handled pistol in her handbag and a dagger in her garter.
Her adventures sometimes require undercover work. Such as circus performer.
And if she’s not in an adorable hat, she has a sparkly headband. Of course.
And every now and then her lesbian bestie visits in the greatest tweeds and brogues.
Did I mention the clothes?
She prefers younger men
Plural.
But you’ll totally ship these two.
She knows how to fly planes,
and teaches young girls self defense on top of table manners.
But these two are the cutest most innocent couple you’ll ever see. Seriously cute.
There’s so much more, but you’ll just have to watch it. The first season is on Netflix streaming in the U.S. so I hope you enjoy this kick-ass lady. She’s seriously cool.
Seriously, this is one of the best things to come out of my country in years. It’s great quality, it’s visually and aurally rich and delicious, and it’s a fun romp from start to finish. But also? It’s female gaze. It’s about women living to the hilt. It’s about unashamed sexuality and decadence. It also tackles serious subject matter of the times that often specifically relates to women – education, medicine, media, birth control and abortion, the temperance movement, sex work, class issues, race issues, gay and lesbian issues, religion, war and family. The second season even has an episode with an female autistic academic that it manages to depict better than most contemporary shows. It’s a joy, and you need it in your life. And it’s been signed for a third season to begin filming next year. So what are you waiting for?
First of all, congratulations on your excellent taste. Second of all, this is a touch confusing so instead of trying to hunt up issue numbers I’m going to try and lump it together in trades for ease of reference. For those who don’t know what trades are, that’s basically the big ol’ collected editions of comics in the graphic novel section 🙂
ENJOY
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Bucky returns! It’s very angsty. You saw the movie)
Captain America and Bucky: The Life Story of Bucky Barnes: A recap of the preceding adventures with gorgeous art and bonus Natasha.
Captain America: Fallen Son/The Man With No Face/Two Americas (Bucky Cap! Bucky has a lot of weird adventures, Zemo ties him to a rocket again, Red Skull’s crazy daughter starts a personal vendetta, Bucky and Sam are cute)
Captain America: The Trial of Captain America (Red Skull’s crazy daughter leaks Bucky’s true i.d and past as the Winter Soldier to the press, Bucky stands trial for his crimes as the WS, is extradited to Russia because laws)
Captain America: Prisoner of War (Bucky is shirtless in a Siberian Gulag and fights a bear. It’s the best thing ever. I got my copy signed by Sebstan because I love it so much. Bucky finds out he trained sleeper agents and decides to go back to being the Winter Soldier to take them down. Steve becomes Cap again.)
Winter Soldier: Longest Winter/Broken Arrow/Widow Hunt: Bucky as the Winter Soldier takes down the sleeper agents at the cost of his relationship with the Black Widow, who is kidnapped and brainwashed into forgetting him completely. I cried for a thousand years.
Winter Soldier: ElectricGhost (Bucky fights a lady named Tesla Tarasova (he killed her dad in his WS days), feels bad about his life, makes some new friends, and is a big old goofball about Natasha)
EXTRA CREDIT:
Black Widow: The Name of the Rose, which is mainly about Natasha but also features some very cute Buckynat.
All-Winners Squad: Band ofHeroes, in which Bucky meets up with some old WW2 kid sidekick type buddies and it’s terribly sad/great
Neither of them commented on the picture of them which has now gone viral. When, after the verdict, Mr. Rogers leaped the gate to tug Mr. Barnes down into a kiss, a member of the audience took a photograph of the moment and uploaded it to twitter. The original tweet was swiftly deleted, but copies of the picture continue to circulate and seem unlikely to disappear from the internet. Some people are already calling the picture “a disgrace” and demanding that indecency charges be levied, but others are far happier.
Done for radialarch and nuitdenovembre’s courtroom drama, United States v. Barnes, 617 U.S. 143 (2015). This story is fantastic — the story itself is styled to resemble courtroom transcripts, text messages, news articles, and twitter feeds revolving around the trial of Bucky Barnes for crimes against humanity as the Winter Soldier. radialarch mentioned that it would be awesome if someone tried to do a courtroom sketch of one of the scenes. It wasn’t until I was nearly finished that I realized I should have done the lineart using a marker and pencil brush to make it look more like an authentic courtroom sketch – I’m still very rusty at this whole art thing. You should have seen the dust on my Wacom 😦
Gah I wish this could be better. It doesn’t do the fic justice. Please go read it!
Remember how I promised to post an adorable fic I wrote about when Sam and Riley met Steve and Bucky? Yeah, I almost forgot about it.
Almost.
Lucky for you, I remembered.
A couple years back—a lifetime ago, really, in the days where he slept like a caveman and waited for letters from home (not home the place but home the person)—Sam overheard one of the guys talking about how, sometimes, little kids are drawn to broken people. “Well, kids and dogs,” the guy’d joked, and Sam’d grit his teeth to keep from reaching over and punching the laughter right out of him.
Broken people, he’d scrawled in a letter a couple days later, the sand beating against the roof like the world’s most persistent hail. Who the fuck says that, huh? Who the fuck thinks we’re not all coming out of this broken?
adds “we just caught our alternate universe selves making out and now everything is super awkward” to list of shipping tropes that need to be implemented everywhere
Seconding that rec, I own that book, it’s called Children With Emerald Eyes and it’s fantastic. I wrote a long review of it on Goodreads, if you want to know more about the content. It’s hard to read at points because of the difficult subject matter, but it’s a very unusual, quality book about post-world war two child psychiatry by a very ahead-of-her-time professional. Rather than dated I’d call it historical. I own a lot of books about child psychiatry, psychology and special needs teaching/therapy (like, over 50, not even counting any of my dedicated autism books, and I’ve read many more), and I can say without hesitation that it’s in my top ten.
As a supervillainsupercriminal contract worker with a morality deficit, Clint Barton leads a glamorous life. You know, stolen cars, dangerous women, a really confusing relationship with a meddling do-gooder, the works. It’s pretty awesome. Except for, uh, medical bills, the mob, and being on the run all the time. That part isn’t all that awesome.
(A supervillain AU where Clint shoots arrows at people and gets beat up a lot. So, not really that much of an AU.)
Okay, I usually don’t single recs out, but this fic, guys, it is SO GOOD. It is incredibly funny and ever so sightly cracky in the best of ways. It’s got the failboaty Clint Barton that we know and love, he’s just working for the other side. He’s Deaf, he’s a bit of a manslut, he’s kinky, and he loves what he does (even if it does wind him up hurt nine times out of ten), and he’s got the gang of Bucky, Natasha, Kate and Lucky around him to get him on his feet again. It’s got sign language. It’s got ridiculous comic book fights, inadvisable hookups, and a lot about the grey (sexy) line between heroism and villainy. It’s got a bit of violence and a bit of fairly kinky sex with various partners, but those scenes are short and I don’t think it’s hugely explicit, and even if kink isn’t your thing I really think this fic is well worth reading. It’s about so, so much more than bedroom shenanigans and it’s just so much fun that I think you’ll like it even if a Clint who likes being slapped around a bit isn’t your thing. I don’t remember the last time I read a fic where I had to stop so many times to literally laugh out loud.
knitting in the dark 