American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century

Maureen Callahan has done the public a service with this book. It reads like an expose of all the things we should be taking different LE and legal agencies to task for.***This review starts with a semi-rant about how this case was screwed up. My analysis of Maureen’s writing and the book overall is titled separately below if you want to skip the complaining. ;-) ***The Rant:If you’ve never heard of Keyes, he’s likely the most terrifying serial killer we’ve ever had, and one of the least known. Least known because authorities deliberately hid the info they had on him. If you DO know the Keyes case, and you haven’t been pissed about how it was handled, you should be, and will be, after reading this book.(Side-note: For years I’ve been complaining to anyone who’d listen, online and everywhere possible about the FBI withholding info on this case. I’ve been screaming, “Cover up!” like a conspiracy theorist. BECAUSE IT WAS. You bastards! I knew it!! Lol).Bravo, Maureen! Seriously. This book demonstrated clearly how ego and bravado screwed up a massive case, and the subsequent cover up. There were a few good agents, great periphery LE with their hearts in the right places ... and idiot “big shots” who bungled everything and made rookie mistakes with Keyes, subsequently losing valuable info.Now, this case is one I followed extensively, and was completely infuriated by the investigation. I watched all the FBI interviews (that were released anyways), multiple hours of them — and wondered what the hell a US Attorney’s office prosecutor was doing playing interrogator ... how did he think that would turn out for a trial ...?I followed Maureen Callahan’s multi-year long battle in court to get the FBI and US Attorneys office to release all the info they had on Keyes. And boy, did they fight it. And I wondered ... why? What are you hiding? Keyes is dead, there’s no investigation to protect, you won’t be prosecuting him. So why protect his info now that he’s gone? Why keep a no-publicity promise to a serial killer when there’s still friggin victims unidentified out there! (As Keyes himself said, most will just be straight missing persons cases. No real press, no muss or fuss. Just another person ghosted in a sea of missing people.) Or were they protecting themselves? Yep. ALL the agencies involved buried their mistakes. As Callahan points out, the interview where Keyes correctly predicts an underwhelming response to Samantha’s kidnapping from the outset by APD was buried for years. Until she dug it up.The public should be outraged over this case. Yet barely a blip, certainly the LE involved we’re not held accountable following Keyes death. I hope they realized how incredibly bad they effed up and have since made changes, but ...This entire case is a study in missed opportunities. Now we have a victim count we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of, and little to no info or follow up post-Keyes suicide. To be honest, I think Keyes only gave them a count of bodies he thought might eventually be found and/or possibly connected to him. There’s more out there. And we don’t know who they are. IMO, the US Attorneys office & APD, (and possibly the FBI for allowing all the bungling), wanted this case to vanish as much as Keyes did. Obnoxiously, it did.I was excited for Maureen’s book, but thought there wasn’t much new info I would get out of it. In fact, there was quite a bit. This peeled back the investigation, a glimpse into the mindset of the investigators. Quick nod here to Texas, you guys are THE SH*T. Keyes himself was amazed at how on guard ordinary people in Texas were, how observant and well armed. Plus your LE? As I believed before, the LE people who did best in this whole mess of a case, who were most on top of it all ... were the Texas Rangers and State Police. These guys knocked it out of the park. They took vague info and turned it into an arrest. If only they could’ve run the rest of it! No, not exactly fair. Had the FBI agents who’d been tracking Keyes taken the lead on questioning and the rest ... maybe we’d have a different outcome.My analysis of Maureen’s writing and style:I saw reviewers point out they didn’t feel Maureen could extrapolate feeling and tone from transcripts. That’s true, EXCEPT, there’s video to go along with those transcripts — the tone is VERY easy to sense. Along with the power struggles and silent battles. Her interpretation of the power dynamics and missed opportunities in questioning were exactly what I got out of those tapes. So everyone else, please understand, she’s not making things up here.There were a few times I thought, “Ok, you can’t know what he was thinking here so writing this investigators innermost thoughts is a ballsy writing move.” Yet, those few occasions were logical thoughts anyone would’ve had. She used them as teaching moments, i.e. times where quotes from interrogation transcripts showed clear questioning errors on the prosecutor’s part, and another investigator would think, “That’s a mistake.” Stuff like that. Not a stretch. But I still think some leeway should be given here; Maureen mentions extensive interviews with individuals involved at the beginning of the book. So we have to give some latitude for that. I didn’t see anything in this book I thought ventured towards the fictional.Now, in the interest of fairness, Maureen had to fight the US Attorney/DOJ for years in court to get the info for this book. So it’s possible she had a resentment bias while writing in regards to Feldis screwing up this case. BUT, I thought her treatment of him was fair — bc he WAS the main screw up point in this case. Everything she wrote I agreed with.This book is extremely well written. It’s VERY in-depth, piecing together so much info on Keyes, it felt like a goldmine to someone like me who’s been frustrated by the info blackout. I read the only other book on Keyes and found it lacking. This is a result of years of fighting the government for their records, and meticulous research. Yet it’s not dry or boring. This was a fully engaging page turner. It keeps you totally immersed in the investigation and Keyes in general. Very well done, I was impressed.I read this book in one day, it was a page turner.

This story was nuts - and proves just how easily someone can get away with horrific acts like what Keyes did. Love the way this was written. Engaging, horrifying and intriguing all in one.

THE most chilling and creepy book I’ve ever read!!It’s so horrifying to understand that this all has happened for real.The thoughts, the discourse of the main character are so detailed in this book.I’m a very sensitive person, actually I’m a pacifist to my fingertips. I’ve been literally felling sick while reading the second part of the book.How this even can happen in people’s minds and how people can be so cruel?I’m a fan of detectives and suspense, but this one really kept me on the edge. I won’t go into fact checking or evaluation of different agencies’ work in my review. But this book is really terrifying.

As an avid true crime reader, American Predator absolutely shook me. I’ve read a lot, but this one stood out with its chilling details and sharp storytelling. Maureen Callahan’s writing is razor-sharp—detailed, suspenseful, and terrifying in its realism. The way she pieces together Israel Keyes’s crimes is both methodical and horrifying. If you think you've read it all in true crime, think again—this book is next level.

This book is famous for the legal battle the author undertook just to get access to the FBI's files on Keyes a battle she won. But you would never know it from the resulting book, her description of the crimes is so off base and so full of complete nonsense that I found myself doubting if she had bothered listening to any if the interviews with Keyes she fought so long to access. A couple egregious examples: she states the infamous shed was in the backyard, when it was in the front. She repeats the fiction that Samantha's eyes were open in the proof of life photo Keyes took for the ransom note. She states that Samantha made her escape attempt when Keyes stopped to pick up a lost digital camera outside the kiosk, which is refuted by Keyes description as well as the video of them leaving the kiosk. Her assertion that Keyes staked out the Common Ground kiosk multiple nights before the kidnapping when Keyes only mentions once. And on and on and on. She conflates timelines and compresses events and is seemingly incapable of simply describing events as they were reported to have occurred by Keyes, the only source of any information about any of his crimes, period. Why she would go to all the trouble she did to obtain access to the files on this case and then write a book not only completely bereft of any sort of insight into Keyes methods or motivations but factually inaccurate to the point that if you have listened to Keyes interviews the book becomes something like a literary stick in one's eye, much more irritating and infuriating than enjoyable. People read true crime, especially books by authors who purportedly have access to more info than the public, expecting to find the true in true crime. This book is a slap in the face to readers accostumed to authors who take their writing seriously and pay attention to the facts of a case. This book is beyond disappointing. One would expect as has happened in other cases that the author would make public at least some of the files her publisher fought so hard to obtain, but after seeing how little her book has in common with those records I doubt she will be making them available any time soon

American predator is a disturbing story of Israel Keyes - a 21st century serial killer. Police and FBI failures and red tape complicate cases and limit victim identification. Reality is very different from TV. A fascinating read.

I could not put the book down. I read it cover-to-cover in less than 24 hours. That should be praise enough.