Anyone You Want Me to Be: A True Story of Sex and Death on the Internet

John Douglas

Unfortunately, my first review of this book was eaten by LiveJournal in my first attempt to post it, so this one will be short, nasty, and brutish. My apologies. The fact, though, is that Anyone You Want Me to Be attempts to straddle the line between the kind of true crime book that gives you all the juicy details (as per, say, Ann Rule's nonfiction potboilers) and the kind that focuses more on the investigation than the crimes themselves (as with Michael Bilson's recent book on Peter Sutcliffe). The obvious problem is that it's impossible to give both sides focus; when you give one focus, the other suffers. If you try to give both focus, they will suffer equally rather than getting into balance. And that is the case here.

It doesn't help that John Douglas, despite the longstanding love of Mindhunters that exists in the true-crime community, is not all that good a writer. In this case, he hasn't chosen his co-writer well, either. There's a good deal of florid language, a number of personal reminiscences and interjections from Douglas that have a tangential relationship at best to the actual goings-on here ("they didn't use a profiler, but if they did, I'd have told them..."), and it's all surrounded by narrative that fails to capture the excitement of the kill, or the thrill of the chase, in any real way.

Completists only. You'll get almost as much information in less than 5% of the space from the crimelibrary page on Robinson.