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alexauthorshay's review against another edition
3.0
I don't know if it was entirely my state of mind while reading this book or if it was the book, but given the small size it was a *slog* to get through. I got a lot of useful information out of it, so part of the slowgoing was that I was taking notes. However, this book is from 2003 and likely hugely outdated (namely in the computer databases and sophistication of DNA technology), so using it as a reference point for how task forces work is less than ideal. It's more of a 'how task forces should work' anyway, since at the point of publication of this book, several major serial killer cases had gone horribly awry due to multiple factors, some of the major ones being cooperation between different forces and evidence collection/access. Everything had to be recorded manually on cards, compared to our ability now to search online databases. Honestly, everything this book says is pretty much common sense, and that task forces were not doing any of those things already blew my mind.
I do think the way it was written contributed to the difficulty of absorbing the material though. Keppel is a detective, and even though the book is written in mostly accessible language, there are times where the way he expresses things don't entirely make sense. And this is not helped by the multitude of typos throughout.
I do think the way it was written contributed to the difficulty of absorbing the material though. Keppel is a detective, and even though the book is written in mostly accessible language, there are times where the way he expresses things don't entirely make sense. And this is not helped by the multitude of typos throughout.
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