In The Killer's Shadow, John Douglas, one of the first full-time profilers to work for the FBI, recounts his role in helping to capture a serial killer who went on a racism-fuelled killing spree across the U.S. in the 1970s. Some of the methodological information is interesting, if not always for the reasons that Douglas thinks—there's quite a bit of back-patting about the success of certain techniques used, even though forensics specialists are increasingly dubious about their utility. (At one point Douglas mentions a case where, if his characterisation here is correct, someone was jailed for murder on the strength of a criminal profile and bitemark analysis—and that's not a standard of evidence I'm comfortable with!)

Douglas does tie what we can learn from the actions of this killer to more contemporary events linked to white supremacism, such as the Charlottesville march or the Charleston church shooting, but doesn't push his analysis far enough. At one point he seems to suggest that if the killer hadn't been blinded in one eye as a child he would have joined the local police force—and thus, it's implied, never become an avowed Nazi. I mean, maybe? But from everything I've observed about the behaviour of U.S. police over the last few years, I'm not sure that logic holds. He might just have felt free to terrorise Black and Jewish people from a position of authority. ( )