The FBI’s pioneer of criminal profiling, former special agent John Douglas, has studied and interviewed many of America’s most notorious killers—including Charles Manson, "Son of Sam Killer" David Berkowitz, and "BTK Strangler" Dennis Rader—trained FBI agents and investigators around and the world, and helped educate the country about these deadly predators and how they operate, and has become a legend in popular culture, fictionalized in The Silence of the Lambs and the hit television shows Criminal Minds and Mindhunter.

Twenty years after his famous memoir, the man who literally wrote the book on FBI criminal profiling opens his case files once again. 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.

Going step by step through his interviews, Douglas explains how he connects each killer’s crimes to the specific conversation, and contrasts these encounters with those of other deadly criminals to show what he learns from each one. In the process, he returns to other famous cases, killers, and interviews that have shaped his career, describing how the knowledge he gained from those exchanges helped prepare him for these.

For those of us addicted to true crime, the inexorable tide of TV shows, podcasts and books on the subject in recent years has provided ample sustenance. Now, with The Killer Across The Table, John Douglas and Mark Olshaker have brought something genuinely new to the genre.

This is very far from mindless wallowing in a crime’s gory details. Drawing on twenty-five years with the FBI, criminal profiler John Douglas talks us through the interrogations with four predatory killers that enabled him to understand the macabre rationalization behind their grisly crimes—and in doing so provide a way of predicting and catching out future monsters. The exchanges are fascinating (his subjects often relating their most heinous deeds with chilling nonchalance) and Douglas clearly builds a rapport with his subjects, who seem to respond to his desire to give their actions some analysis and provide terrifying insight into their dark hearts.

In Killer, it is the forensic examination of motive that is most compelling. Did the murderer get off on watching his victim’s terror, or did he view their anguish as an irrelevant consequence of his desire to kill? Did he dispose of the body or return later to relive the ‘glory’ of his crime? Douglas shows us that it’s the answers to questions such as these that shed light on the killer’s mindset; into what separates one kind of psychopath from another, allowing us to come closer to understanding why these anomalies of nature do what they do.