Even though both books focus on routine activity theory and examine opportunities for crime events and the relationships between crime opportunities and the volume of crime events, the books differ in their approaches to criminology theory building. Felson begins by discarding all criminality theories except control theory and then builds control theory into the routine activity theory. He does not make any explicit tests of his integrated theory but uses examples to demonstrate the plausibility of his approach. In contrast, Miethe and Meier keep all criminality theories, making no judgment as to their validity, and then use carefully constructed data sets to determine empirical relationships among theories. In contrast to Felon's theory first approach, Miethe and Meier take a more inductionist approach. Both books are evaluated in terms of theoretical reductionism, units of analysis, and research on crime events. 22 references