I'm surprised there's little discussion of this on the main forum, though I suppose the link to McGowan's Laurel Canyon series counts for something. Anyway I just finished reading the book.
McGowan suggests that the "serial killer" profile we have is completely inaccurate, and goes to lengths to show this. "Lone monsters" are like "lone nuts"--they've got friends, family and more often than not co-conspirators. McGowan extends this, and suggests a few other things. First, that the serial killer mythos was cleary seized upon and created to inculcate fear in the public, as a means to push a law & order agenda. He doesn't dwell on it much, but McGowan points out that serial killing in the US resembles Project Phoenix and the activity of US-trained Latin American death squads enough that it very may well be offical action on some level. It follows, of course, that big name serial killers are either patsies or agents. McGowan loosely ties the serial killer milieu to that of organized pedophilia. And he doesn't say it explicitly, but implies strongly that it's all part of something much bigger--that the Satanic cults Henry Lee Lucas, Berkowitz et al. bragged of, or warned about (or both)--none of these characters have ever claimed to act alone--are much bigger than we'd like to think.
But, of course, there's good and bad about the book.
Pros:
--it's very detailed. McGowan has about 400 references.
--the details are gory and fill that true crime infotainment urge
--McGowan nails the parts about defense complicity with prosecution, about the simple but ignored fact that "serial killers" don't operate alone
--the section on the Dutroux case and the Finders, and even Jon Benet Ramsey, are the strongest. Those alone are terrifying, well sourced and verifiable.
--the fact that Henry Lee Lucas gave cops the location of a death cult ranch years before it was broken up is really fucking terrifying; That alone is enough to bust up tunnelvision, and the book is full of solid facts like that.
--watching episodes of Law & Order is totally hilarious after reading the book. I just can't look at Mariska Hagitay the same way anymore, which really is a shame.
--the central thesis is solid. A for content...
...but C- for execution.
Cons:
--McGowan self-published the book, which hits credibility right there.
--There's at least two major editing errors. Missed punctuation I can forgive; including two different drafts of what are quite obviously the same passage one after the other is sloppy and suggests poor editing, i.e., more damage to credibility.
--No index and no footnotes or endnotes. The references are part of a bibliography. You can imagine this also hits credibility.
--The work largely parses other written materials; sections heavy on news articles (like Dutroux) are strong for doing so, but sections that rely on two or three books (like many of the chapters on specific individuals) are weak.
--the details are gory and fill that true crime infotainment urge such that after 270 pages of severed heads, buckets of blood, videotapes of child-rape and skilsaws cutting human bone, you'd probably do best to volunteer at the local no-kill animal shelter helping with kitten playtime. McGowan gets kind of lost in details and doesn't come back to his central theory enough.
--McGowan falls off many of the speculative branches he's climbed onto, usually when he starts nit-picking at isolated datapoints.
