“The Killer Across the Table” by John Douglas & Mark Olshaker

John Douglas is best known for being the profiler who created much of what we now know as criminal profiling. He has interviewed many of the most well-known criminals, including Ed Kemper (the Coed Killer), Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Dennis Rader (the BTK Strangler). With these interviews and many others, he and his coworkers created the Crime Classification Manual, which is still revised and used today for training criminal profilers and by all sizes of police forces. Douglas retired after over twenty-five years of service with the FBI and began his later life careers, as a writer, a teacher, a producer, and occasionally an assistant profiler. Even though he is retired, Douglas often gets asked to help with profiling cases for movies, TV shows, books, and other police forces looking for a fresh break in an unbreakable case.

In The Killer Across the Table, one of Douglas' numerous books with his writing partner, Mark Olshaker, readers are given information on four of Douglas' most disturbing cases as a profiler, which given the names listed above, should make any squeamish reader think twice before beginning. Douglas and Olshaker have written many books together, including Journey into Darkness, The Cases That Haunt Us, and Mindhunter (on which the Netflix series was based).

According to the book's Amazon synopsis:

In this riveting work of true crime, he spotlights four of the most diabolical criminals he’s confronted, interviewed and learned from. Going deep into each man’s life and crimes, he outlines the factors that led them to murder and how he used his interrogation skills to expose their means, motives, and true evil. Like the hit Netflix show, The Killer Across the Table is centered around Douglas’ unique interrogation and profiling process. With his longtime collaborator Mark Olshaker, Douglas recounts the chilling encounters with these four killers as he experienced them—revealing for the first time his profile methods in detail.

For The Killer Across the Table, readers are introduced to Joseph McGowan, Joseph Kondro, Donald Harvey, and Todd Kohlhepp, four killers who broke the mold of what was expected of them in their crime sprees. This true crime book is geared toward readers who don't cower away from the dark side of the criminal mind. Douglas goes in-depth with each crime and his meetings with the criminals, leaving some readers queasy, especially when they remember that these events all actually happened (most within recent history). As a true crime aficionado, I thought the condensed information about each crime was helpful as a research tool for a book club I ran.

However, from a literary point of view, The Killer Across the Table is a bit too textbook-ish in the amount of information it throws at readers in one sitting. As a nonfiction book, it is understandable that there are copious amounts of facts, but a book containing four different storylines of crimes makes for a confusing, sometimes difficult read. I think that multiple books focusing on one of the crimes at a time would make for more enjoyable books because, as a reader, I often found, after taking a break from reading, that I was confused over which killer did what to how many victims. It didn't help that Douglas often went off on tangents, comparing the killers to more well-known offenders, like the Son of Sam or BTK Strangler. I found that these tidbits were often strange, and I didn't really understand the context of how they fit in with the storyline of the killer being profiled. Ultimately, The Killer Across the Table does better as a research tool than a sit-down and read-for-enjoyment book.