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A review by library_hungry
The Profiler: My Life Hunting Serial Killers and Psychopaths by Pat Brown
2.0
1.5. Not a common score--if you hate it that much, are you actually going to parse how much you dislike it? But really, the extra 0.5 is because I got what I asked for--stories of a profiler solving crimes by thinking them through.
Why wasn't it good? All sorts of reasons. Not very well-written--clearly the coauthor had plenty of work to do in just organizing the author's points coherently and keeping it from looking like a report. Aside from a few canned phrases of support, she paints the police pretty much uniformly as lazy, untrained, political hacks who don't really care if murderers are at large preying on our precious children. In fact, she's pretty dismissive of almost everyone.
There was also the more mundane, reader-centric frustration of the fact that she works only on cold cases, and no one really seems to listen to her. Although she comes up with a fairly well-reasoned theory in each of the cases she outlines, no case is ever closed or killer ever caught. And even when her conclusions agree with those of the police, she's still really disparaging of them.
Blargh.
Why wasn't it good? All sorts of reasons. Not very well-written--clearly the coauthor had plenty of work to do in just organizing the author's points coherently and keeping it from looking like a report. Aside from a few canned phrases of support, she paints the police pretty much uniformly as lazy, untrained, political hacks who don't really care if murderers are at large preying on our precious children. In fact, she's pretty dismissive of almost everyone.
There was also the more mundane, reader-centric frustration of the fact that she works only on cold cases, and no one really seems to listen to her. Although she comes up with a fairly well-reasoned theory in each of the cases she outlines, no case is ever closed or killer ever caught. And even when her conclusions agree with those of the police, she's still really disparaging of them.
Blargh.