The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling

Corbett, Rachel

ISBN 10: 0393867692 / ISBN 13: 9780393867695

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2025

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 26403863606

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393867692
• ISBN 13: 9780393867695
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

A riveting work of true crime that tells the strange story of criminal profiling from Victorian times to our own.

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. But what exactly is it, does it work, and why is the American public so entranced by it? What do we gain, and endanger, from studying why people commit murder? In The Monsters We Make, author Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society’s most seductive and quixotic undertakings through five significant moments in its history.

Corbett follows Arthur Conan Doyle through the London alleyways where Jack the Ripper butchered his victims, depicts the tailgate outside of Ted Bundy’s execution, and visits the remote Montana cabin where Ted Kaczynski assembled his antiestablishment bombs. Along the way emerge the people who studied and unraveled these cases. We meet self-taught psychologist Henry Murray, who profiled Adolf Hitler at the request of the U.S. government and later profiled his own students―including the future Unabomber―by subjecting them to cruel humiliation experiments. We also meet the prominent Yale psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, who ended up testifying that Bundy was too sick to stand trial. Finally, Corbett takes the story into our own time, explaining the rise of modern “predictive policing” policies through a study of one Florida family that the analytics targeted―to devastating effects.

With narrative intrigue and deft research, Corbett delves deep into the mythology and reality of criminal profilers, revealing how thin the line can be separating those who do harm and those who claim to stop it.

About the Author

Rachel Corbett is the author of You Must Change Your Life, which won the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing. She is a features writer at New York magazine, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.