SPECIAL AGENT

Watch out, Clarice Starling—there's a new sheriff in town, and she's the real deal.

Comparisons with the worried FBI profiler who chases Hannibal Lecter around the globe are inevitable; though Thomas Harris may not have based his character directly upon now-retired special agent DeLong, she fits the bill for a real-life counterpart very nicely indeed. DeLong adds a solid entry to the library of real-crime literature, recounting her efforts over a distinguished career to bring all manner of reprobates to justice, from scum-of-the-earth child molesters to more rarified figures like the Unabomber and the Tylenol Killer. Her pages are packed with grim statistics—99 percent of all sex crimes, she notes, are committed by men, a significant number of them over the age of 50; fewer than half of the 200 to 300 children who go missing for more than 24 hours return home alive—but, despite such dour numbers, her narrative is highly personalized and full of juicy anecdotes that make it a (sometimes guilty) pleasure to read. It's clear from those tight stories that DeLong took her work seriously—as she writes, she firmly believes that “the Bureau [is] a big shark fence protecting the world from the dangers and predators of the deep,” though, she adds later, extending the benthic metaphor, “It is up to us as citizens, as a society . . . to decide who should be swimming freely in our midst.” Her devotion to the FBI did not keep her from falling afoul, late in her career, of agency rules forbidding moonlighting, to which she had to turn to pay the bills. DeLong writes effectively and without overmuch rancor about the culture of the FBI, a once males-only club (thanks to former director J. Edgar Hoover's antipathy toward women, institutionalized in an agency-wide conviction that women just couldn't hack the blood-and-guts work of crime-fighting) that she helped storm. When DeLong entered the agency, she notes, “women represented less than 4 percent of the agent force of 8,000.” She adds, “Today we're still a minority but a much more significant one—15 percent of the total of 11,500 agents.”

An effective recruiting poster for women in police work, and a highly readable memoir for law-and-order buffs of whatever persuasion.