The Stalker

Kate Rhodes

Average Rating 7/10 (1 Review)

She thinks she understand stalkers. Until she becomes a target...

Elly is an expert in stalking – an academic at Cambridge University and a popular media pundit. She knows the subject intimately: what motivates a stalker, how they behave, how to rehabilitate them.

But now it’s personal. Someone is following her, making silent phone calls and sending her ominous notes. The message is always the same – me or you.

Elly can’t trust anyone – not her family, her friends or her colleagues. She knows that her stalker must be someone close to her. And when they suddenly turn violent, she realizes she’s running out of time to find out who it is.

Because it looks like only one of them will survive.

A terrifying cat-and-mouse chase, told from the perspective of the stalker and the stalked - a roller-coaster ride with an ending you won’t see coming.

Review by Ben Macnair (110325) Rating (7/10)

Review by Ben Macnair
Book Source: Not Known
Rating 7/10
The Stalker takes a good idea, and really goes to town on it. Elly is a respected phycologist, a media pundit, a well qualified and published Academic. Her work on Stalkers, who they are, and what they do makes her a target both online and in her real life.

She knows the signs to look out for, and how a stalker works. She knows that many of them have been developing their habits for years before they become a real threat to their victims. They could be anyone, another passenger on the train, a work colleague, or just someone you see every day.

When a Stalker makes himself known in her life, reveals her secrets to her work colleagues and family members, there is a palpable sense of danger and tension in the book. There are twists and turns in the novel that leave the reader on the edge. Can anyone in the story be trusted? As the denouement races ever closer, we don’t know what will happen, although little tell-tale signs have been there throughout the course of the narrative.

This is a crime novel that does not go in for gore, but there is a sense of unease throughout it. There is a sense of danger as the Stalker uproots everything in Elly’s life, her family and workplace are affected. The sense of a life, and a career being derailed are well drawn.

This is a fine read, both gripping, and also human and believable. The sense of logic when the stalker’s identity is revealed is both obvious, and also convoluted. She had many chances to see who it was before we did, but as the book closes there is a sense of Elly’s family life and career resuming, although there will also be a sense of dislocation from what went before.
Ben Macnair (11th March 2025)