Customer Reviews

Mindhunter: Inside the FBI Elite Serial Crime Unit

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John Douglas has the capability of captivating the reader through his real life story telling. This book draws you into the mind of a profiler as he seeks to find the truth. Gripping details, unbelievable acts of terror, and horrifying facts will have you looking over your shoulder for days. You must read this if you are a true crime buff. The legendary profiler is also a legendary author.

This is a great book gives you an eye on the inside of one of the FBI creators for the Behavioral Science Unit.

I found John Douglas's story about himself and his work to be very engaging. He is a funny man and that is a good thing in his line of work.

I found it fascinating that he has developed this profiling science that has helped with many, many cases involving murder.

It's just that I couldn't finish the book. Though very well written, this book is very, very disturbing and gruesome. Half way through, I just could not bear to hear of one more life torturously and needlessly snuffed out. I am thankful for people like John Douglas and for the work they do, I just can't read the details of it.

As a senior at the University of Maryland double majoring in Criminal Justice and Psychology I picked up this book because of professional interests. The beginning is told like most prideful autobiographies that have the intention of communicating the God-like nature of the author (think Dick Marcinco - The Rogue Warrior, Frank W. Abagnale Jr. - Catch Me If You Can etc.)The descriptions of John Douglas' younger years were kind of tedious and uninteresting(the first 65 pages or so,) as the reason I picked up the book was to get a better overall understanding of investigative profiling.

Most of the book is fairly well written, and interesting to read. Douglas points out that he has been the lead profiler in many of the serial crimes cases that Americans seem towet their pants over. (The Unabomber, The Atlanta-Child Murderer, The Green River Killer) He also describes the process by which he interviewed many serial killers after they were caught. Most of the book is dedicated to showing the accuracy of criminal profiles when done by someone who knows what they're talking about. Douglas proves this point over and over again, making ney-sayers look stupid over and over again.

I enjoyed the book, but I had several issues with its content.

1. When Douglas relates his first person encounters with criminal interviewing he often goes into an extremely poor writing style exchanging the first person for the second, and exchanging the past tense for the present. He also is fond of using the term "like" a lot just like a valley girl. An example of this would be "Then we were all like this guy is crazy. . ." instead of "I knew what the other team members were thinking, we all thought he was crazy. . ." Because of this, I often found myself rephrasing this poor form of writing while I was reading it in order to get a better understanding.

2. It has some fallacious information do to the publication date. I think newer editions should come with extra content do to the development of what has recently happened in several cases mentioned in the end of the book. Mainly that the Green-River killer turned out to be - one person(not three) - Garry Ridgway; And that BTK was caught and shown to be Dennis Rader. Douglas also gives a bit of spurious information at the end about how Jack the Ripper was the first media sensationalized serial killer - that was actually Gilles De Rais. He probably just didn't consider the French media of the 1400's to be sensationalized enough.

Besides those two points Dr. Douglas did a fine job telling of his experiences and definitely got me interested in the field of investigative criminal profiling. If your looking for a more collegiate version of this book without the personal annals check out Robert K. Resslers (John Douglas' partner) Profilers: Leading Investigators Take You Inside The Criminal Mind