Customer Reviews

Profiling The Criminal Mind: Behavioral Science and Criminal Investigative Analysis

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I stumbled across this book while doing research for my graduate degree. I must say that besides presenting the information in a very clean and clear fashion, the author also has a killer sense of humour. I have read hundreds of academic books during my undergraduate and now graduate degree work and I have never laughed while reading an introduction to a textbook before (Dr. Girod fills it with some good jokes and stories and how they relate to the criminology theories).
anyways, a great read highly recommended!

I was recently introduce to watching shows like Criminal Intent, Criminal Minds, Profiler and that lead to my interest on reading up on the human mind...and more specifically the criminal mind.

This book was very through with introducing all aspects involved with criminal profiling and my only disappointment was that there were not more case studies examples to flesh out the theory that was given in the book.

The ability to explain the scientific process of behavioural science and criminal investigative analysis in a straight forward easy to understand manner amazes me. This would give me a deeper appreciation with the interaction of the shows im watching.

Definately recommend to people who are interested with having a basic understanding of the criminal mind and the police investigation process.

I received this book extremely fast after ordering and was very excited to begin reading it. With my excitement rising, I began to read the preface and slowly my excitement began to fade. I am not an extremely fast reader and have not had a lot of experience with profiling or even psychology/behavioral science for that matter and the text seems to be based on someone having previous knowledge of the subject. After reading many books, there are two main types, written by a "writer" and written by a knowledgeable professional. This book was written by a knowledgeable professional and can be easily seen by the authors word/sentence structure choice as well as his ability to have his writing flow.

That said, the book is very interesting and I have not put it down, but the way it is written makes it difficult for the average reader. It goes through the basics of criminology and profiling allowing the reader to start from the beginning and work their way up to the more advanced material. The book often lists statistics for certain aspects such as type of crime percentage. It keeps your interest and once I start reading, its hard to put it down.

Overall, I would rate the writing/understanding as expressed by the stars, but content wise, the book is great. If you are interested in profiling or behavioral science and have a basic understanding of concepts, this book is for you. It takes a little while to get used to the writing style, but once you get the hang of it, you are not going to want to put it down.

Very good overview of the field, but a little overextended in its breadth. Much of the material was so superficial that it gave no real understanding of the topic that would be useful in a practical sense. It redeems itself with a good list of references for each topic so the reader could study further if one particular area was especially interesting.

This book provides a very brief overview on a broad range of topics, but does not give much depth. However, it does give a valuable list of resources for further study.

This was an excellent book in addition to the book I had for my online Criminal course. It gave very good specifics on criminal profiling and helped tremendously!

I was excited to read this book and I'm glad I did. It was a little bit boring in the beginning because it starts with the basics and basic psychology and I already know most of the stuff. But it is a very good beginners book, I'm a nurse so nothing to do with forensics but have always been interested in these things. Glad I bought it.

The work tends to be dry and mechanical, very much a textbook style. Dr. Girod would have done well to take a creative writing course at some point during his stellar academic career.