The Anatomy of Motive The FBI's Legendary Mindhunter Explores the Key to Understanding and Catching Violent Criminals

From legendary FBI profiler John Douglas and Mark Olshaker -- authors of the nonfiction international bestsellersMindhunter, Journey into Darkness,andObsession-- comes an unprecedented, insightful look at the root of all crime.Every crime is a mystery story with a motive at its heart. With the brilliant insight he brought to his renowned work inside the FBI's elite serial-crime unit, John Douglas pieces together motives behind violent sociopathic behavior. He not only takes us into the darkest recesses of the minds of arsonists, hijackers, bombers, poisoners, assassins, serial killers, and mass murderers, but also the seemingly ordinary people who suddenly kill their families or go on a rampage in the workplace.Douglas identifies the antisocial personality, showing surprising similarities and differences among various types of deadly offenders. He also tracks the progressive escalation of those criminals' sociopathic behavior. His analysis of such diverse killers as Lee Harvey Oswald, Theodore Kaczynski, and Timothy McVeigh is gripping, but more importantly, helps us learn how to anticipate potential violent behavior before it's too late.

John Douglas (left) has become the leading expert on criminal-personality profiling and the pioneer of modern criminal investigative analysis during his remarkable twenty-five-year career with the FBI. A veteran of the Air Force, he is the author of numerous articles and presentations on criminology and the coauthor of the landmark books Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives and Crime Classification Manual. He has been called upon to analyze violent crimes from those of the Unabomber to the Nicole Brown Simpson-Ron Goldman and JonBenet Ramsey murders. John Douglas and Mark Olshaker coauthored Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit; Unabomber: On the Trail of America's Most-Wanted Serial Killer; Journey into Darkness; Obsession; and the novel Broken Wings, which is now available in hardcover from Pocket Books. Douglas lives in the Washington, D.C., area.