About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

CRIMINAL MINDS: JUMP CUT
by Max Allan Collins
Signet, November 2007
288 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0451223187


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

A serial killer is targeting the homeless in Lawrence, Kansas, kidnapping and then killing them. Police are getting worried that the killer is becoming more violent. They fear that more people will be killed while they try to make headway into the case, so they request that a team of FBI profilers, the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), be sent in to help them. The group is made up of the best profilers the FBI has to offer and each member has their own area of expertise.

After the BAU team arrives, another kidnapping occurs but many details of this latest kidnapping differ from the first four. Now a wealthy young woman has been taken. She is not homeless but is a college student and also unusual, a ransom is asked for. The peculiar amount of $68,000 dollars and a deadline to deliver the ransom is declared.

Though many things are different in this crime, the BAU team is certain that the kidnappings are all related because they feel the town is too small to have two different kidnappers. These changes in the crime and how the killer's MO is changing brings the BAU team into a tizzy of activity as they delve deeper and question people involved in detail.

Every once in a while a chapter is narrated by the killer, showing some of the thought process that is going on in his head, but the writer is very careful not to give too much away.

This story is told by a third person, a voice that spends an extraordinary amount of time describing how the members of the BAU team look and how they think and why they act the way they do. Because this book is based on a television program, I suppose the writer wants us to visualize the actors who play the parts, because the fans of the show tend to have favorite characters and they have to be made happy so that the book will sell. But as a reader I found that too much time was spent describing how they look and hearing what wonderful specimens of FBI profiler perfection are the members of the BAU.

This constant approval of even the facial expressions of the characters slows the reading down and underlines too strongly that this is based on a TV show. OK, I know that the public adores the characters of the show, but when you're writing a book, readers want to see a good plot with an exciting investigation and great resolution. Here so much time was spent adoring the actors that the tension was undercut and the resolution was dull.

Criminal Minds is a TV show that leans more on the characters for main interest than on action or violence. Because the camera tends to spend a lot of time staring at the characters, I think that this program isn't one that would make a good book series. Writer Max Allan Collins has stated that he stopped writing the printed books for the CSI series in order to write the Criminal Minds series.

I don't think that there is a real need for this written Criminal Minds series in books; especially not while the TV show is still going strong.

Reviewed by A. L. Katz, November 2007

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]