Mindhunter

This is not a book for true crime aficionados like myself. By my estimation, it was written for members of the John Douglas fan club and anyone else who needs to know the minute details of his life. In fact, I’d say it’s written for people who love Douglas at least as much as he clearly loves himself. HOLY COW can this man bloviate! It is barely an exaggeration to say that pretty much every sentence in the first 100+ pages (that’s how far I got before throwing in the towel) is crafted to show how amazingly smart, cool, brave, athletic and good-looking John Douglas is. Even his supposed attempts at self-deprecation are really just thinly disguised backdoor brags. When as a reader you’re continuously losing your place on the page because your eyes keep rolling into the back of your head, it’s time to put the book down.

Perhaps my mistake was reading Robert Ressler’s books first. Ressler was truly a man of humility with a love for his craft. He was instrumental in wresting the FBI from the hands of stodgy old timers convinced of their bureaucratic omnipotence and gearing it towards mining a wealth of other disciplines for their knowledge. He had true empathy for the victims and their families, yet was not beyond seeing the humanity of the monsters whose unforgivable crimes would lead others to write them off as the embodiment of pure evil, thereby forgoing time and again the opportunity to truly understand what made them — and those like them — tick.

While being respectful overall to the individuals with whom he worked over the years — Ressler does use the forum of his book to briefly address certain intra-office gripes he had over his illustrious career. It should come as no surprise that he intimated very briefly that Douglas had a habit of overstating his own role in certain major cases (Ressler says he straight-up LIES with regards to his relationship with John Wayne Gacy).

Unlike with Douglas, the bulk of Ressler’s books focus on the cases and their psychological underpinnings, in addition to the perpetrators and victims. In other words, his books deliver what true crime connoisseurs are seeking. In Douglas, I found a writer far too consumed by the cult of his own personality to focus much on actual crime. Perhaps that story changes somewhere well into the triple-digit pages, but I eventually lost interest in slogging through how amazing John Douglas is to find out.

This is an amazing book. I loved the Netflix series and look forward to season 2. I picked this book up to read the REAL story of John Douglas. John is a real person with real problems he had to deal with. I admire the fact he didn’t hide them to make him look like a supercop. He is a man that is detail oriented and took notes. Putting all he heard together with some gut instinct, came up with a manual cops can use today to locate prolific killers and even those who may have only had one killing incident. He can be caught before he can take another life. This is what I found to be so interesting as John leads the reader through the painful beginnings of the BAU. He captured my interest and held it throughout the entire book. I bought the audio version and I’m glad I did. The reader made John come alive for me. He sounded firm, yet vulnerable, aggressive yet sensitive. If you want to know how profiling became an integral part of criminal investigation this is the book to read. I hope to read more of his books this coming year.

Wanting to read the book because of the show I decided to give this book a try. All I can say after that is…..Man! I was hooked! This book is incredibly well written and a total page turner. Whats most appealing about it compared to other books that deal with the same topic is that it is very simple to understand. A lot of criminal books are very complex and you have to go into them already knowing some aspects of the system it presents to you but thankfully, this book is written knowing you probably aren’t an FBI agent yourself. The author John Douglas, starts off the book going into his background and how he got involved with the Bureau and after that, the book just literally goes case by case, crime by crime, killer by killer, from chapter to chapter with some elements of the author’s personal life progressing through. If you are really into knowing what the mindset of serial killers are (just like the author was) then this book is totally for you. You could probably finish it in just a couple days if you have nothing else going on. The book is about 409 pages long but that felt like nothing by the time I reached the end due to how addictive it was to read.

The Physical Book Itself:
It looks like Amazon now sells the Netflix TV show edition of the novel which is the one I received and its a rather large paperback but the font size of the words in the book is large and easy to see and/or read if thats a concern you might have. My book came in a little beat up which was kinda annoying but nonetheless, this edition is a worthwhile purchase.

A compelling look at how criminals think and what you can learn about the criminal, from the crime. Your feelings on the book will be swayed by how you feel about the writer himself. He’s very convinced of his skill and his personality really comes though in the writing. The only downside to this book is that the first 3 chapters are all context and background on the writer himself. Its well written and does help in a better understanding of the writer, but for a book about profiling killers its not nearly as engaging as the rest of the book. But overall quite a unique and thought provoking book.

I loved this book!!! A mixture of his life story and profiling cases for the FBI. Very close to the Netflix series, I watched right after reading. Not sure why some reviewers say he is full of himself, I didnt get that at all. There are times you have to mention certain things because its simply part of the story and cant be left out. I also saw people saying it was boring. I can only guess these people are paid trolls to leave negative feedback, or arent interested in behavior science because it was never boring, it was fascinating. Full of cases. I just ordered Obsession, looking forward to it!!
*The book was bent up pretty bad from shipping, but that was Amazons fault and I didnt want to have to wait and go through hassle to return. Fixed it best I could.

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