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alyjack80:

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.