Sixty years ago this month, jittery New Yorkers heaved a collective sigh of relief. George Metesky was on his way upstate to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The Mad Bomber’s 17-year reign of random terror had finally ended, with a whimper.

“He was like a dream distortion of postwar disquiet — unhinged, unrelenting, perpetually hidden in city shadows,” Michael Cannell writes in “Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling” (Minotaur Books, $27), his gripping retelling of the search for the schizophrenic toxic avenger who nursed a decades-long grievance against his former employer, Consolidated Edison, by terrorizing the city.

Mr. Cannell, who stumbled across the case in an Argentine newspaper while researching an earlier book (he has written on the Grand Prix circuit and on I. M. Pei) spins a familiar tale in riveting TV-paced chapters with a novel twist.

Besides the bomber, the plot revolves around three men: Capt. Howard Finney, the highly professional but frustrated commanding officer of the New York Police Department bomb squad; Dr. James A. Brussel, an eccentric gun-toting psychiatrist and assistant commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, who is concerned about risking his career by predicting the bomber’s personality traits based on his crimes; and Seymour Berkson, the peripatetic publisher of The New York Journal-American, who is desperately seeking to spare his newspaper from the Hearst Corporation’s bean counters.