Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood haunted me for an entire year. After I had inhaled every word, fascinated yet repulsed by the graphic details in what might be the best-known and best-written of all true-crime stories, I felt vulnerable in my own home. Like many people, I have a penchant for this sort of non-fiction; I am eager to read every minute detail of murder and curious about the motives behind the crime, yet the senselessness and randomness of the violence scares the hell out of me.

In Crime Seen, former cop and Ontario Provincial Police profiler Kate Lines concentrates not on the too-often-glamourized perpetrators of violent crime, but on the victims and anguished families left in their wake. Lines began her career handing out traffic tickets, graduated to undercover work, and ended up as only the second Canadian – and first woman – trained in profiling at the prestigious Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Virginia, and a consultant on some of Canada’s most infamous murder cases (and TV cop shows).

Her book is an insider’s take on heinous crime, its prevention, and detection. Lines is no-nonsense as she describes what she has witnessed, and provides insight into how such crimes could be prevented, or at least solved more quickly. In child abduction cases, particularly, time is of the essence: in the first hour after they are taken, Lines asserts, 47 per cent of these children are murdered.

Crime Seen is the autobiography of a cop whose goal is to bring closure to victims’ families. It shuns the gratuitous components that make many true-crime stories so popular; I read it not with anxiety, but with a heightened appreciation for those who are attempting to build a system in which predators are not idealized, but held to account. Some of the more specialized or arcane details – like an examination of the different levels of policing and duties within and between the FBI and the OPP – might be of little interest to the general public, but overall, Lines’s book is engaging, and should be recommended reading for all instructors and students of policing and police sciences.