The book is a substantial contribution to the recent academic literature on homicide, at the same time being written in a reader-friendly manner which will help it reach a wider audience, including students of criminology and criminal justice. It is informed throughout by the author’s now considerable research and teaching experience in this area. Her doctoral work was concerned with explanations of different kinds of homicide, especially those committed by men, and she explored and developed theories around the concept of ‘masculinities’ and issues of control. She also considered the extent to which homicide should be regarded as a unique kind of crime, deserving of its own theoretical explanations, or whether it should primarily be regarded as the extreme end of the spectrum of violent behaviour (the death of the victim often being the result of behaviour not initially aimed at killing, and to some extent contingent upon fortune – as it were, the difference between a knife hitting the heart or an arm) and hence explicable in the same ways as serious violence in general. In exploring such questions, she undertook extensive analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data, including details of all cases recorded in England and Wales on the Homicide Index and a considerable number of police files.