Over a period of about 10 years, beginning in the late 1990s, book collector John Gilkey of Modesto, Calif., acquired an impressive array of rare first editions by authors including Mark Twain, Beatrix Potter and Vladimir Nabokov. Money was no object because Gilkey didn’t buy his books. He stole them.

As veteran journalist Allison Hoover Bartlett relates in her skillfully composed true-crime debut, “The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession” (Riverhead, $24.95), Gilkey used worthless checks and stolen credit card numbers to defraud dealers, large and small, out of more than $100,000 worth of coveted volumes. A master of self-justification as well as self-enrichment, Gilkey maintained that it was “unfair” for dealers to charge more than he could afford for the books he desired. Theft, he reasoned, was simply an equitable means of redistributing the wealth.

During his crime spree, Gilkey attracted the attention of Ken Sanders, owner of a Salt Lake City bookstore and security chairman for the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. Tracking Gilkey across the country, Sanders devised a cunning trap to snare the book thief, successfully putting him in prison — albeit only for a short time.

Bartlett’s eminently readable account of the cat-and-mouse game played by Sanders and Gilkey is notable not only for its fluid presentation but also for the depth of the research upon which it draws. Bartlett conducted extensive interviews with the book thief and his pursuer, gaining the confidence of both men, who shared their stories with an oftentimes surprising candor.

The initial contacts between Bartlett and Gilkey, which occurred while the latter was incarcerated at the Deuel Vocational Institution, 65 miles north of San Francisco, introduce an unexpected note of levity into the narrative. Unfamiliar with the prison’s rules forbidding metal objects, the intrepid reporter has to dash out to her car to remove her underwire bra.

Her sense of culture shock only grows once she gets a look at life “on the inside.”

With a keen eye for detail and a measured sense of pacing, Bartlett offers an insightful look at the psychology of the most eccentric of criminals in this swift, entertaining volume about what happens when a love of books takes a sinister turn.