Like Patrick in "Rubbernecker," I excelled at dissecting animals in high school and college biology labs. I was also preoccupied by death, specifically violent deaths, and the reasons why people did such horrible things. Perhaps it was because of the Perry Mason mysteries my father gave me when I had a bad case of insomnia at age thirteen. So when I saw my first autopsy while interning at the Fulton County ME's office in Atlanta during graduate school, I was riveted. And while I didn't become a pathologist, my career in the criminal justice field gave me a front-row seat to observe the sad, traumatic, and often violent ways in which disturbed individuals impact society.
During an early morning jog, Atlanta attorney Tom Halloran discovers the body of his friend and colleague, Elliot Carter, hanging from a tree in Piedmont Park. Even worse, the private and dignified Carter is grotesquely dressed in women's clothes. Halloran is convinced that Elliot's death is murder, not a tragic accident of autoerotic asphyxia-gone-wrong. But the medical examiner's investigator, Hollis Joplin, is skeptical. He knows how difficult it would be to fake that kind of death. Then two more people die, and the clues lead back to a twenty-year-old kidnapping. The under-staffed Atlanta PD can't give the case attention unless Carter's death is ruled a homicide, so Joplin, with an eidetic memory, sets out to investigate it himself.
"What kind of person could have done such a thing?" That was the question Douglas and his fellow FBI agents and crime-scene analysts tried to answer when developing criminal-personality profiles for the Behavioral Science Unit.
This book pulls the reader into prison interview rooms as he talks to infamous serial killers like Ed Kemper, Richard Speck, and David Berkowitz and conferences with detectives working on cases like the Trailside Killer in San Fransisco and the Atlanta child murders. It also reveals Douglas' story, from his early life in New York, his military service, and his career with the FBI.
You should read this book even if you've seen the TV version. The series is fictionalized and doesn't fully depict Douglas or his accomplishments.
Before the creation of internet tools like NCIS and VICAP, catching serial killers was formidable. These monsters frequently crossed state lines, and law enforcement agencies couldn't—or wouldn't—share information. John Douglas provided them with a way to "picture" a perpetrator and connect him to the crime scene.
Discover the classic, behind-the-scenes chronicle of John E. Douglas’ twenty-five-year career in the FBI Investigative Support Unit, where he used psychological profiling to delve into the minds of the country’s most notorious serial killers and criminals.
In chilling detail, the legendary Mindhunter takes us behind the scenes of some of his most gruesome, fascinating, and challenging cases—and into the darkest recesses of our worst nightmares.
During his twenty-five year career with the Investigative Support Unit, Special Agent John Douglas became a legendary figure in law enforcement, pursuing some of the most notorious and sadistic serial…
Harris attended some of John Douglas' classes at the FBI Academy, which significantly impacted his writing and crime fiction in general.
He modeled Jack Crawford, the head of the Behavioral Science Unit in three of his novels, after Douglas. This one is his best. It incorporates many of the forensic tools law enforcement agencies possess, like profiling, psychology, and entomology, to bring violent offenders to justice.
It also features a young female graduate of the FBI Academy who serves as our "guide" throughout the investigation of a serial killer who has abducted the daughter of a U.S. Senator.
Clarice Starling's interactions with Hannibal Lector, a former forensic psychiatrist convicted of several murders himself, are some of the most chilling sections of the book. And although John Douglas didn't like the Jack Crawford character, I think he probably saw himself in Clarice.
I'm a big fan of reading a book before seeing the movie version, but if you missed that boat, no problem. You'll still get a lot—maybe more—from Harris' book.
As part of the search for a serial murderer nicknames "Buffalo Bill," FBI trainee Clarice Starling is given an assignment. She must visit a man confined to a high-security facility for the criminally insane and interview him.
That man, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is a former psychiatrist with unusual tastes and an intense curiosity about the darker corners of the mind. His intimate understanding of the killer and of Clarice herself form the core of Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs--an unforgettable classic of suspense fiction.
To date, no movie or TV show has been made from Hayes' novel, but I'd drop everything if that happened.
Don't let its length—624 pages—keep you from reading it. It'll be over too soon. The protagonist, Scott Murdoch, is a former member of The Division, a U.S. agency that investigates wrongdoing by other intelligence agencies. After leaving the Division, Murdoch, using a pseudonym, wrote a forensic investigative handbook that has made him a law enforcement superstar.
He's drawn into the investigation of a murdered woman, dismembered and put into an acid bath in a Brooklyn hotel, by Ben Bradley, an NYPD homicide detective. A snippet from Murdoch's book has been found flushed down the toilet.
And that's just the beginning. The rest involves a murdered billionaire in Turkey and a Saudi Arabian doctor called the Saracen, who's bent on revenging the execution of his father by creating and releasing a fool-proof way to infect most of the U.S. with smallpox.
But the forensic techniques employed by Bradley's team, then Murdorch and the Division's other assets, make this book stand out among espionage novels. A process that reveals unseen detail in a mirror in the room where the billionaire dies is dazzling.
Murdoch's unrelenting courage and determination to fulfill his mission thrust the reader into a harrowing journey that would overwhelm a team of Navy Seals.
The astonishing story of one man's breakneck race against time to save America from oblivion. _______________ A FATHER PUBLICLY BEHEADED. Killed in the blistering heat of a Saudi Arabian public square. A YOUNG WOMAN DISCOVERED. All of her identifying characteristics dissolved by acid.
A SYRIAN BIOTECH EXPERT FOUND EYELESS. Dumped in a Damascus junkyard.
SMOULDERING HUMAN REMAINS. Abandoned on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan.
PILGRIM. The codename for a man who doesn't exist. A man who must return from obscurity. The only man who can uncover a flawless plot to commit an appalling crime against humanity. _____________
I've never read a book quite like this. It was a little challenging to get into, but by the time I finished, I was blown away by the author's talent.
The character-driven plot makes whiplash-inducing twists and turns from several points of view. The reader is first drawn into the mind of a comatose patient who is slowly regaining consciousness and thinks he sees his roommate being murdered.
Next, we're following Patrick Fort, a teenager with Asperger's Syndrome, who has won a disability scholarship to study anatomy at Cardiff University. Patrick has spent the last ten years fixated on finding out what happened to his father, the victim of a hit-and-run driver.
His habit of bringing home dead animals and examining them alarms his mother but is the foundation for his later expertise in biology, particularly in dissection. At university, he and his team are given a human cadaver and instructed to discover its cause of death.
Through other perspectives, like Patrick's mother, his friend Lexi, a nurse at the hospital, and the doctor overseeing the anatomy class, the narrative lurches toward a conclusion that most readers won't see coming. It also asks some big questions about the nature of consciousness, dying, love, and compassion.
“Breathtaking. I read this and wished I’d written it.”—Val McDermid
Belinda Bauer is a phenomenal voice in British crime fiction, whose work has won the CWA’s Gold Dagger Award for Crime Novel of the Year and garnered rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. Winner of the 2014 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, Rubbernecker is a gripping thriller about a medical student who begins to suspect that something strange is going on in this cadaver lab.
“The dead can’t speak to us,” Professor Madoc had said. But that was a lie. The body Patrick Fort…
And now for something completely different, set in the People's Republic of Laos in 1976.
Dr. Siri Paiboun, a former surgeon and socialist activist now old and disillusioned with the Communist Party, has become the country's only coroner. It's a job he hates, made worse by corrupt officials and a judge who tries to turn even blatant homicides into deaths from natural causes. And by the dead, who haunt his dreams.
Aided only by his Thai nurse, Dtui, and his mentally-challenged morgue attendant, Geung, Siri must deal with the bodies of three men who weren't supposed to be found and the suspicious death of a senior official's wife. Both are political tightropes. As he teeters on them, Siri travels to an unfamiliar area where the people know him—but as the reincarnation of Yeh Ming, an ancient shaman.
Soon, he's having hallucinations that may, in fact, be very real. To save his own skin and solve all the riddles he encounters, Siri has to confront both the living and the dead.
The magic realism, juxtaposed with the narrative's cynicism and amusing, ironic tone, make this book a delight.
In Laos in the year 1976, the monarchy has been deposed, and the Communist Pathet Lao have taken over. Most of the educated class has fled, but Dr Siri Paiboun, a Paris-trained doctor remains. And so this 72-year-old physician is appointed state coroner, despite having no training, equipment, experience or even inclination for the job. But the job's not that bad and Siri quickly settles into a routine of studying outdated medical texts, scrounging scarce supplies, and circumnavigating bureaucratic red tape to arrive at justice. The fact that the recently departed are prone to pay Siri the odd, unwanted nocturnal…
The Hunt for the Peggy C is best described as Casablanca meets Das Boot. It is about an American smuggler who struggles to rescue a Jewish family on his rusty cargo ship, outraging his mutinous crew of misfits and provoking a hair-raising chase by a brutal Nazi U-boat captain bent on revenge.
During the nerve-wracking 3,000-mile escape, Rogers falls in love with the family’s eldest daughter, Miriam, a sweet medical student with a militant streak. Everything seems hopeless when Jake is badly wounded, and Miriam must prove she’s as tough as her rhetoric to put down a mutiny by some of Jake’s fed-up crew–just as the U-boat closes in for the kill.
The Hunt for the Peggy C: A World War II Maritime Thriller
John Winn Miller's THE HUNT FOR THE PEGGY C, a semifinalist in the Clive Cussler Adventure Writers Competition, captures the breathless suspense of early World War II in the North Atlantic. Captain Jake Rogers, experienced in running his tramp steamer through U-boat-infested waters to transport vital supplies and contraband to the highest bidder, takes on his most dangerous cargo yet after witnessing the oppression of Jews in Amsterdam: a Jewish family fleeing Nazi persecution.
The normally aloof Rogers finds himself drawn in by the family's warmth and faith, but he can't afford to let his guard down when Oberleutnant Viktor…
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