Book Review
Title: Obsession by John E. Douglas & Mark Olshaker
Genre: Non-Fiction, True Crime
Rating: DNF
Having read a lot of Douglas’ books in the past I was excited to see his insights on the mindsets of killers and rapists in Obsession. The opening was interesting as he runs through how profiles are created and how there are times when no matter how accurate their profile is, the killer or rapist is never caught. He also highlights how sometimes their profile can be completely wrong and have the police essentially chasing their own tails which if you’ve read Mindhunter has been the case in some circumstances.
Douglas and Olshaker look at various cases from serial killers to serial rapist and what information they can get about the perpetrator(s) from the crime itself without knowing any other external information. The author make it very clear that these people despite being monsters, they don’t look or act like monsters, and that is why they are successful. They have even been involved in cases where the perpetrator has never been caught and when similar crimes happened years later, he wrote to them and didn’t take responsibility for these new crimes. Douglas and Olshaker make it clear that in most of these cases the motivation is some form of domination or control and this doesn’t necessarily translate into a sexual motivation.
Douglas goes on to look at sexual assault and how like other violent crimes is split into multiple categories and that there are various types of offenders. Having personal experience with this particular topic actually answered a few questions I’ve had for years which was an enlightening experience. Douglas goes over several cases from various perspectives and the outcomes of those cases, however, I was finding that Obsession was dragging a lot more compared to the other books I have read by these authors and since several of the points are both not in-depth enough and repetitive, I did make the decision to DNF this book.
This doesn’t reflect on Douglas’ work since I have read several books from these authors, like Mindhunter and The Cases That Haunt Us which were amazing, I just wasn’t getting along with the style of obsession as I much more interested in the true crime element rather than the psychology elements.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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