About the Book: In 1990, a young woman was strangled on a jogging path near the home of Pat Brown and her family. Brown suspected the young man who was renting a room in her house, and quickly uncovered strong evidence that pointed to him--but the police dismissed her as merely a housewife with an overactive imagination. It would be six years before her former boarder would be brought in for questioning, but the night Brown took action to solve the murder was the beginning of her life's work.
Pat Brown is now one of the nation's few female criminal profilers--a sleuth who assists police departments and victims' families by analyzing both physical and behavioral evidence to make the most scientific determination possible about who committed a crime. Brown has analyzed many dozens of seemingly hopeless cases and brought new investigative avenues to light.
In The Profiler, Brown opens her case files to take readers behind the scenes of bizarre sex crimes, domestic murders, and mysterious deaths, going face-to-face with killers, rapists, and brutalized victims. It's a rare, up-close, first-person look at the real world of police and profilers as they investigate crimes--the good and bad, the cover-ups and the successes.
About the Authors: Pat Brown is a nationally known profiler and founder and CEO of the Sexual Homicide Exchange (SHE) and the Pat Brown Criminal Profiling Agency. She holds a master's degree in criminal justice from Boston University and developed the first accredited Criminal Profiling and Investigative Analysis program in the country for Excelsior College, where she is an adjunct professor. She appears on national television and radio often--more than 1,000 times in the past decade to discuss high-profile cases. Brown lives in Minnesota and Maryland.
Bob Andelman is the author or co-author of several best-selling biographical, business, management and sports books, including Will Eisner: A Spirited Life, The Profit Zone: Lessons of Strategic Genius from the People Who Created the World's Most Valued Companies, and Built from Scratch: How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion. Bob Andelman also produces and hosts the popular "Mr. Media Interviews" podcast on BlogTalkRadio.
The authors did a magnificent job demystifying the field of profilers, stating clearly that this is not suppose to be the art of divination, but a real reasoning subject based on scientific methods and analysis of psychological/psychopathic minds of the suspects. As Thomas Edison would say, "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" (he was referring to geniality, but we can apply this idea to profiling without fearing of the quote being misused).
Giving a brief history on how she became directly involved with this field, Pat Brown tells the readers some of her cases (the ones that she can talk about) and all the sequence of her reasoning for reaching her conclusions. And we notice that she take her job seriously and with passion and that makes all the difference when you are dealing with some of the most horrific atrocities committed by a human being against another human being.
She goes deep in analysing ten cases, providing all details that composed each one of those cases. And one of her quotes is really good: "While anything is possible, everything is not probable". I would add to this quote the famous Occam's Razor "The simplest explanation is usually the correct one" and there you go!
I would recommend this book to any serious reader who likes a good reasoning book. This book deserves to be in a permanet library to any reader who thinks he is a sleeping profiler ready to wake up, learn and go to action.
This book was written by Pat Brown with Bob Andelman in 2010, published by Hyperion Books and distributed by HarperCollins, who were kind enough to send me a copy for reviewing. If you read this review, feel free to post a comment.
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