All through college, and for several years after, I was a self-professed true crime girlie. I suspect my interest sprung from watching CSI with my parents growing, nestled up in the secure monotony of Midwest farmland while learning about decomposition and blood splatter. In my mid-20s, several provoking pieces about survivorhood and a handful of podcasters who shamelessly utilized flawed research methods made me turn my back on the genre, suddenly squeamish at my own voyeurism.
Rachel Corbett’s nonfiction masterclass The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling (W.W. Norton & Company) plays directly into the sensibilities of the widespread true crime genre, but with exceptional self-awareness driven by closeness. Corbett and her family have experienced shocking violence, making her nonfiction work visceral as she seeks answers about her survival. She explores the melding of psychology and criminology as a way of understanding her own childhood, making the work equal parts investigation and reminiscence.
Corbett travels through history, reviewing some of the most famous criminal cases and the people who orbited them. Her chapters focus on Arthur Conan Doyle’s obsession with Jack the Ripper, Henry Murray and his “profiling” of Adolf Hitler, the relationship between psychologist Dorothy Lewis and serial killer Ted Bundy, the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and the utilization of an intelligence-led policing program in Florida. Written conversationally but exactingly, Corbett’s writing flows like narration, never straying too far into technicalities. She informs the reader without ever coming across as if she is “speaking down” to anyone, resulting in a nonfiction book that feels novelesque. Her organization and attention to detail are impeccable. It feels both like a cohesive work and a collection of essays.
Corbett teases at her thesis for long enough that the final chapters serve as an earned conclusion. She explores the fascination people have long since held with how psychology and crime intersect, acknowledging the double-edged sword of this relationship. Efforts to conduct psychological research were often as likely to cause harm as they were to help — and yet this investigation grants access to a new realm of understanding and advocacy. By spending her final chapter focused on the Jones family of Pasco County, and the way law enforcement used profiling to target and harass them, Corbett quietly offers a warning to the crime junkies of the world: criminal profiling, while fascinating, is an imprecise science with vast consequences if used improperly.
The book begins with a guttural reliving of Corbett’s father’s attempts to kidnap her mother, and the story of how her mother’s ex-boyfriend killed a woman and himself. In the epilogue, Corbett chooses to focus on her memories of the men, reminding the reader and herself that they were both human. She removes the instinct to create distance by rooting the reader in her life, giving tactile insights into her lived experiences. It’s fair to be interested in criminal profiling, she communicates, but consumers must also remember that real people exist in those spaces.
The Monsters We Make is as artful as it is factual, simultaneously concise and musing. Corbett encapsulates fascination, fear and guilt without ever passing judgement.
Read an interview with the author:
This article was originally published in Little Village’s November 2025 issue.
