In the Name of the Children: An FBI Agent’s Relentless Pursuit of the Nation’s Worst Predators

Crimes against children are probably more abhorrent to people than any other crimes. The men and women of law enforcement who take on those cases have to steel themselves to deal with the abusers and killers without losing their professional perspective in order to solve the terrible crimes. Jeffrey Rinek spent 30 years working for the FBI, and most of those years were spent pursuing those who preyed on children — abusers of the most vile kind, rapists, kidnappers, even serial murderers. While the child victims were always the intense focus of the cases Rinek worked on, he developed skills that allowed him to find the humanity in the perpetrators, no matter how horrific the crime, in a way that engendered trust and openness on the part of the perpetrators that oftentimes lead to confessions. While the crimes Rinek discusses in this book are pretty hard to contemplate, through the sensitivity to the subject matter and his readers’s sensibilities, he and co-author Marilee Strong, an award -winning journalist specializing in criminal reporting, have created a compelling addition to the true-crime genre.