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Closely Watched Shadows is inspirational and enlarges our knowledge of the human condition. It is different in style from any book I have previously read in that, although it is an intimate, poignant autobiography, it is not like other autobiographies. Although it is an exciting, informative text it is not like other texts—though it provides details of the history and processes involved in psychobiography and profiling of criminals that leads to the successful tracking of such serial murderers as the Son of Sam and the Zodiac murderer.
Closely Watched Shadows highlights the repeated multilevel stresses of the psychiatrist and police who are the hunters as they are drawn emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually; morally and spiritually; voluntarily and involuntarily; consciously and unconsciously, into the day-and-night, demoralizing hunt that, if successful, will prevent the viciously depraved killing of additional innocent victims. The author, Ron Turco, does not neglect descriptions of the painful, serious ripple effects on another group of innocent victims, namely, the families of the hunters.
Turco is an Academy colleague with consummate access to his inner self, his free-associations, his dreams, and self-process usually kept secret. As a writer he is able creatively and authentically to share this inner self as he weaves from past to present in a riveting review of how his whole life prepared him to bring justice to a pedophile who had molested nearly 100 children and eventually murdered three in hellish, brutal, sadistic, torturing ways. Similarly he uses his skills as a psychoanalyst to bring us the past and present of the killer who was inexorably driven to develop the severe personality disorder that Turco diagnoses as “malignant narcissism.” He presents the elements in the killer's family life that fostered the development of his becoming such an alienated, sadistic, evil, depraved pedophile.
In the book's title Turco refers to the shadows of evil, f