This book aims to give an overview of diagnostic virology for the clinician. It has chapters, which take clinical syndromes and entities, such as urinary tract infections, and then briefly discusses the viruses, which cause diseases within those entities, and the methods used to detect the specific viral aetiology. Additionally there is clinically relevant data such as a Kaplan-Meier plot of the relationship between CMV DNA load, as detected by PCR, and the likelihood of the development of CMV disease in AIDS patients. It is comprehensive and broadly upto- date, with coverage of human herpesviruses 7 and 8 included.

A major advantage of this text is that it is multiauthor but has had a uniform editorial style. It is useful to have the clinical and laboratory overview in one single volume. Most books on clinical virology are either virus-specific or are methods handbooks. It is also relatively brief, being a little over 300 pages, which is presumably purposeful so that it might attract the busy clinician. There is a useful to have an appendix that summarises the tests that should be considered for each clinical syndrome.

The book has American authorship and it is predominantly the USA market that is targetted. It is less likely that British clinicians would purchase such a book, which is a shame, as many virologists would recognise that they should! Perhaps in the UK, it would more likely attract a general microbiology trainee wanting to get an overview of diagnostic virology in their early and then final years as a specialist registrar, although this would compete with more standard, and larger, British texts which cover both the clinical and diagnostic texts in sufficient detail for the MRCPath.