Stalking has rapidly gripped the popular imagination, partly because some of the facts are so good that the media does not have to make them up. For example, a US study of the enclosures sent in mail to Hollywood celebrities and US Congress members included syringes of blood and semen, a bedpan and a coyote's head.

We are used to the idea of celebrities being stalked, but there are many more obscure and unusual victims, for example, the incarcerated armed robber who received considerable media exposure and was subsequently inundated with letters from adoring women. One became so persistent, even flashing her genitals at him during a noncontact prison visit, that the inglorious victim had to appeal through his lawyer for the ‘hero-worship’ to stop.

Hence, this is one of those rare books, absolutely essential for forensic psychiatry seminar reading lists, which if browsed in the library, you will take home because you cannot put it down.

Although this deserves a wider audience, because the stories it tells are more gripping than any crime bestseller, perhaps only in a work by academic psychiatrists would one find the following: “We have come to realise that many stalkers inflict considerable pain and damage on themselves in the pursuit of their victim”. While the popular media has devoted thousands of column inches in pursuing the curiosity of stalking, nowhere else will you find the kind of dispassionate attempt at understanding that rigorous behavioural science, as exemplified by this book, can bring to a forensic phenomenon.

But the problem of trying to embark on the study of a behaviour that is as yet not properly defined can also make objective study appear ponderous. For example, the attempt to operationalise the definition of stalking — “ the behaviour should consist of at least ten separate intrusions and/or communications, the conduct spanning a period of at least four weeks” — appears oddly unfeeling to victims.

The authors, all from Monash University Department of Psychiatry in Australia, acknowledge that “nobody would want to advise a terrified victim who has had a man stand outside the house looking up at the window on nine consecutive nights that, according to Mullen et al (1999), there was another night to go before he or she could lay claim to being stalked”. On the other hand, it is only in a book like this, where adherence to data is the guiding principle, that you can uncover the truth. For example, stalking is in fact not a modern phenomenon at all but is centuries old, with some surprising practitioners, including Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher.

The work is comprehensive, including discussion of related phenomena such as stalking by proxy, cyber-stalking and false victims of stalking, with some excellent practical advice on management of stalking from both the professional's and the victim's standpoint.

The few weaknesses include a neglect of the issue of assassins, who are one subtype of stalker, albeit rare, but who evidence suggests are often evaluated by mental health professionals at some point before they step out on the path toward assassination. Also, although the research is relatively meagre, there is a literature on predicting future violence from threatening letters, including some useful anecdotal comments from US private and public agencies involved in threat management, which the authors appear to believe is not academic enough to include fully.

The final problem is common to practically all accounts of bizarre and ultimately self-defeating behaviour: a full understanding of why stalkers do it still seems elusive. Perhaps the authors could have elaborated on what a good theory of motivation might look like, even if it is as yet unattainable. Certainly the authors' own classification of stalking, based on differing motivations, is the most convincing of the many rival taxonomies, but there remains an abyss between the theoretical understanding advanced here and our ability to predict what stalkers will do next.