Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI

This book is an overview of the career of the FBI man who nearly single-handedly created the system for personality profiling of violent offenders. If there's a big-time multiple murderer from about 1950 until now who hasn't been interviewed by Robert Ressler, he probably refused the honor. Indispensable reading for serial killer mavens, and better written than John Douglas and Mark Olshaker's Mindhunter, this book is packed with fascinating details from dozens of cases: The killer John Joubert, for example, started his life of cruelty as a kid one day when he was riding his bike with a sharpened pencil in his hand. He rode up next to a little girl who was walking, and stabbed her in the back with the pencil. Ouch!

• The Anatomy of Motive
• Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit
• Dark Dreams: A Legendary FBI Profiler Examines Homicide and the Criminal Mind
• The Cases That Haunt Us
• The Stranger Beside Me
• Journey Into Darkness
• Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters
• I Have Lived in the Monster: A Report From The Abyss
• I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
• Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders