The Stalker by Kate Rhodes – review plus author interview

Stalking destroys your life, your relationships, your career. It isolates you and leaves you with no support and little hope. But suppose you are an expert on stalking. Suppose you are the person the victims turn to. And suppose a predatory stalker is stalking you.

Kate Rhodes is an academic and poet who wrote her first crime novel in 2012. She is the author of the Alice Quentin series, featuring forensic psychologist Alice Quentin. She followed these with the Isles of Scilly mysteries, with the hero DI Ben Kitto.

In her latest book, The Stalker, she branches out into a standalone, exploring the dark and dangerous world of stalkers, basing this partly on her own experience of being stalked.

Dangerous obsessions

The Stalker is a psychological thriller.

Eloise Shaw is a psychologist with expertise in the crime of stalking. She has established an innovative programme for the obsessive people convicted of the offence, and it is proving successful.

So far, the perpetrators treated by her who have been released from prison have not continued to stalk their victims.

Advice for victims

She also has a growing reputation in social media, and puts out regular videos advising victims of severe stalking on how to keep themselves safe. The rules are clear:

Eloise’s secret

But Eloise has a secret.

She is being stalked.

For the past few months, she has been on the receiving and of letters, phone calls and odd incidents that are gradually becoming more threatening. Each contact contains just the words “You or Me”.

Despite her expertise and experience, Eloise has broken her own rules.

She hasn’t admitted to her colleagues that she is the victim of a stalker, and she hasn’t modified her behaviour to keep herself safe.

After an attack that puts her in hospital, she begins to fear that she is the target of the most dangerous kind of stalker of all, a predatory stalker, one that plans a sexual or physical attack that will destroy her.

Foolish decisions

The attack leaves Eloise with bad concussion.

Now, confused by a head injury, she begins to make a series of foolish decisions.

She discharges herself from hospital against medical advice. After the shock discovery of her husband’s affair, she leaves home and moves to an isolated cottage in the country.

Her once-secure home life with her husband and their son is falling apart.

When one of the stalkers she was treating, who has been released, attacks and almost kills his victim, her professional reputation comes under serious attack.

Suddenly, Eloise’s whole life: her family, her marriage and her career are under threat.

Tense and claustrophobic

Rhodes structures her narrative in the alternating voices of Eloise, and of her stalker, each section headed You (Eloise) and Me (the stalker).

This creates a tense and claustrophobic narrative, where the toxic malice of the stalker, and Eloise’s confused bewilderment, draw the reader into this very dark world.

Eloise knows all too well that violent stalkers usually come from somewhere within the victim’s close circle. She can no longer trust her closest friends, her colleagues, her siblings, and now her husband.

Blame

Eloise has kept her stalker a secret from her colleagues.

At first this seems irrational, and could almost be a plot device. But as the reader learns more about Eloise, she is shown to be a woman who lives with secrets.

She was subject to serious trauma as a child.

Her father killed himself, and after his suicide, her mother rejected her. Eloise’s mother and her siblings blamed her for her father’s death.

But she has no recollection of the event. Her memory has shut it out. Though she has recently been reunited with her siblings, her memories will not come back. She is afraid that something unbearable is lurking there. Secrecy is her safe place.

The stalker moves through Eloise’s life invisibly.

In my novel Only Darkness, the reader knows more about the stalker’s actions than the victim does, which can create unbearable suspense.

The Me sections of The Stalker allow Rhodes to do the same thing. We, as the readers, know exactly how much danger Eloise is putting herself in with the decisions she is making.

Dangerous decisions

Some of these decisions are deeply frustrating.

She seems to be placing herself deliberately in danger – discharging herself from hospital against medical advice, leaving her home to move to an isolated location that will make the stalker’s work all too easy.

But Rhodes carefully depicts these as the decisions made by a woman who is both in shock, and badly concussed. She makes irrational decisions because she is not rational.

Red herrings

It is clear that the stalker is someone in Eloise’s intimate circle – a partner, a family member, a friend, a colleague – and Rhodes lays her clues cleverly, directing suspicion so the reader keeps having ‘Aha!’ moments that lead down blind alleyways.

Tension

The Stalker is a book that twists and turns. It is a slow burner that moves with a horrible inevitability.

We hear the stalker’s voice and feel the conflicting emotions that motivate them.

This makes the reader more aware of the threat that Eloise faces than she is herself. Eloise’s loved ones get drawn into danger to satisfy the stalker’s need for revenge. But revenge for what? Rhodes racks up the tension to a denouement that is a real nail-biter.

‘A final, shocking twist’

The skilful misdirection through the book makes the denouement, the final identification of Eloise’s stalker, a real surprise.

Some of the publicity for The Stalker claims it is a book with ‘a final, shocking twist’, but this is probably unfair. It creates expectations that the book does not deliver, and is not intended to. A twist is something that makes you look at what you have read or seen with new eyes.

Robert Cormier’s I am the Cheese ends with a twist that makes the reader re-evaluate everything they have read. The films The Sixth Sense and The Others have twists that put everything the viewer has seen into a different perspective.

The Stalker does not do this. The final identification of the perpetrator is surprising because Rhodes keeps her readers guessing right to the end.

The book ends on a satisfying note as the protagonists are finally able to move on.

Rhodes doesn’t tie everything up neatly. Life doesn’t work like that. She has also left the possibility open that she may revisit the world of stalking, a crime that can destroy lives, but that has been too often dismissed in the past.

The Stalker is an excellent addition to Rhodes’ catalogue, and highly recommended.

DR: Do you think stalking is an under-recognised problem in the UK?

KR: Absolutely! When I approached the police they told me that they couldn’t help at all, unless my stalker did actual physical damage to me, or my property, which shocked me.

Stalking is better understood these days, and the police are trained to take psychological harm seriously. They are meant to hear alarm bells, and be aware that it can escalate into a physical attack.

One in five women in the UK and one in ten men say that they have experienced stalking, so it’s a common issue, and one that society is struggling to cure.

DR: Your central character, Eloise, is an expert on stalkers and the treatment of offenders. Did you base her work on real programmes that exist in the UK?

KR: Yes. There is a prison counselling programme which stalkers are compelled to take, but experts acknowledge that it’s much too short to help really entrenched patterns of stalking.

That can take many months or years, in the worst instances. I hope our new government invests in more psychological help to address the stalking mindset. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

DR: In your view, do the police take stalking seriously enough?

KR: No, in a word.

Despite more in-depth training it’s still taken much too lightly by many officers. I interviewed victims of stalking. Their testimony showed that the police ignore the dangers of stalking too often, for both male and female victims.

It really horrified me, given that 60 victims have been killed by stalkers since 2015, and dozens more have been seriously maimed.

DR: Eloise’s world becomes dark, threatening and claustrophobic. How hard was it to live in that world while you were writing the book?

KR: It was a rollercoaster!

I wanted the book to be fast-paced and full of danger, so it left me a bit exhausted at times. It’s tricky to walk the line between making a story believable, and over-identifying with your fictional victim.

I definitely had a couple of pretty dark days, especially after talking with a psychologist who works almost exclusively with stalkers. But overall, I loved it!

Psychological turmoil is always fascinating to write about, I think, even though it can be scary.

DR: Towards the end of the book, Eloise’s stalker seems to develop something close to sympathy for Eloise. Can this be a factor in real-life stalking?

KR: Definitely. I felt genuine sadness for my stalker, as well as fear.

His life seemed tragic, with most of his hopes and dreams pinned on a fantasy that didn’t exist. That must be a miserably lonely way to live.

Several of the people I interviewed took a sympathetic stance, but after a certain point, pity is replaced by fear and resentment; that someone, often a complete stranger, is stealing your freedom.

DR: Eloise’s world is a fascinating one, especially her work with stalkers. Will you revisit it in another book?

KR: One day, maybe. But it was great to write a standalone, after producing 14 series books. It was like writing a film script, instead of a series episode, so it felt like a brilliant new challenge!

DR: A lot of your readers loved your Ben Kitto series, both the character and the setting. Will we see more of Ben and the Scilly isles in the future?

KR: I’ve already written the eighth novel in the Isles of Scilly Mystery series, so thanks for asking.

It’s called Deadman’s Pool, and it starts on the deserted island of St Helen’s, which was home to a religious community, back in the 13th century.

It’s a hauntingly beautiful place, which once housed a plague hospital, where sailors were forced to quarantine before leaving the island.

I love writing books set in Scilly, so it’s hard to imagine stopping any time soon.