SOURCE: "Could a Stalker Have Been Stopped?," in The New York Times, December 19, 1995, p. C21.

[In the following review, Bernstein examines The Stalking of Kristin.]

Kristin Lardner, a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, was gunned down on the street on May 30, 1992. She was a vibrant, gently rebellious 21-year-old whose fatal mistake was to have gotten into a brief romance with one Michael Cartier, a young man with a rap sheet three pages long. When she tried to leave him, Mr. Cartier killed her, and then, minutes later, killed himself. George Lardner Jr., in this investigation of his daughter's murder, knows where ultimate blame should be placed: on the violent and sadistic Mr. Cartier himself. But his anger is all the greater because along the way there were many others who could have prevented the murder merely by doing their job.

Mr...