Description

Criminal profiling-the delicate art of collecting and deciphering the psychological “fingerprints” of the monsters among us-holds an almost mythological status in pop culture. In The Monsters We Make, prize-winning author Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society’s most seductive and quixotic undertakings through six significant moments in its history. She delves into Arthur Conan Doyle’s work on the Jack the Ripper case, Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray’s pioneering profile of Adolf Hitler and his later experiments on his student Ted Kaczynski and the FBI’s famed Behavioural Science Unit’s investigations of such killers as Ted Bundy.

Taking the story into our own time and the use of “predictive policing”, Corbett examines how thin the line separating those who do harm and those who aim to stop it can be.

Publisher Review

“Fascinating… We’re all now aware of criminal profiling, thanks to the likes of Silence of the Lambs and Mindhunter, but how does it really work? Corbett casts an entertainingly critical eye over the practice, taking us through a variety of case studies.” — Neil Armstrong – Daily Mail