Rating: 
Summary: Lose sleep over this one
Review: Again, Minette Walters creates quirky characters outside our everyday experience (thank goodness). Guessing who did it and why sends us back and forth among the suspects. The romantic attraction of Nick and Maggie confuses the murder investigation, spices up the plot, and leave us panting for more. I can't wait for Minette's next book!
Rating:
Summary: Taut, gritty, explicit, suspensful, police procedural
Review: An international best-seller with all the elements that label implies. Walters is a first-rate writer who certainly knows how to get to any reader harboring the slightest impure thoughts. There is a host of really bent characters in this book; it betrays a fascination with several serious losers. Still, the book is very successful of its type. While it won't appeal to readers who are attracted to crime fiction because such fiction offers control and precision in a messy world, the book does reach a satisfactory and realistic conclusion. The novel illuminates a messy world and is full of misdirection. Of several sub-plots, only one has even the hope of redemption. Nevertheless, Walters' skill takes this taut novel where she wants it to go in an effective if controversial manner.
Rating: 
Summary: Minette...what happened?
Review: Oddly enough, I grew to envy Walters' labyrinthine plots and nasty characters. My impression has always been that she has been trying to subvert the genre by populating her novels with loathsome, complex characters whose lives are open to interpretation by the slanted perceptions of the others in each book. This presents us with a world of ambiguity. Walters' unusual talent, and for me the appeal of her crime stories, lies in her creating characters who alternately make our flesh crawl with their quirks and perversities then elicit our sympathy when we understand the events that lead to choices they make. However, for my tastes, The Breaker is run-of-the-mill. The story begins with an excerpt from a book called The Mind of A Rapist and its elementary Freudian analysis automatically forces the reader to overanalyze each of the male characters' libidos. Maybe this is her point. But obviously the suspect list is immediately limited to one sex. Much of the "romance" angle I felt was merely padding and could have been dispensed with. The Jenners were intrusive and annoying and I didn't care about any of their storyline. Overall, fewer twists and hardly a single surprise. I wanted to gasp at the end, not shrug and say "But of course."
Rating: 
Summary: YUK!!
Review: This book was disgusting and boring, I didn't even finish it just returned it quikly to the library. Many of the issues in the novel was very boring not to mention absolutely tedious. I don't think i would want to read any of her book again. AND i'll certainly never fall for a cover again-the reason why i borrowed this in the first place and the fact that it was in the bestseller lists.
Rating:
Summary: Taut psychological thriller
Review: The brutalized corpse was found naked on a beach in the Dorset area. Not far from the crime scene, a couple finds a toddler wandering the streets by herself and brings the child to the police. Later on, the police identify the murdered person as Kate Sumner and the little girl as her daughter Hannah. Two suspects emerge. Steven Harding is an actor, who called the police to inform them that two boys claimed to have seen a dead body on the nearby beach. William Sumner is Kate's spouse, who shared a stormy relationship with her. Both men have motives, opportunities, and means. Both men also are keeping secrets and lying to the police. To learn what really happened, PC Ingram knows he must somehow gain entrance to the inner thoughts of the two prime suspects. THE BREAKER is a taut psychological thriller that will leave readers guessing the identity of the killer until the very end of the novel. This is the heart of the tale as the audience will seesaw back and forth between the two male suspects. The story line is exciting, loaded with red herrings, and filled with increasing tension. Though the characters, including the deceased, could have been more developed to prop up motives, fans of a non-stop, plot driven thriller will take immense pleasure from Minette Walters' dark tale. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: Well executed .....
Review: Minette Walters offers us the tale of a young woman whose nude and battered body is found washed ashore from the sea while her young toddler daughter is found wandering alone in a nearby village. As events unfold we learn about the suspects: her obsessive research scientist husband and the self-obsessed actor who summoned police to her body. Throw in pornography, drugs, scuzzy friends, and a blossoming romance for the local policeman and you've got the recipe for a well-rounded whodunit. This was a relatively quick read, but, as with all murder mysteries, details were important. I confess I wasn't certain about the killer's identity until the end. The plot was evenly paced and the personalities of the various characters were well presented.
Rating:
Summary: Boring and predictable...
Review: ...and not at all what I expected from Minnette Walters. Where the Dark Room and The Echo and all of her other books are intricate puzzles, bending and twisting in on themselves, this books was sadly plodding and straight forward. At first, I found the mystery of the dead woman, and the lost little girl to be tense, but the tension rapidly disappeared into boredom. It took me two weeks to read this book, and it never takes me any more than four hours. The back and forth red herrings that led first to the husband, then to the boyfriend, and back again got tired very quickly, especially as none of teh twists were either original, or unexpected. The only good characters were the rural policeman (his mild romance with the owner of a local stable barely keeping her head above water was the only really interesting part of the book.) and the dead woman, and then only real mystery was teh sea itself. If you want a good mystery, read The Dark Room, or The Sculptress. Definitely skip this one.
Rating:
Summary: Solid, not spectacular, bounce between 2 suspects
Review: In many ways, this is a good read. I enjoyed the world of coastal England. It was also refreshing to have the local constabulary solve the crime without Scotland Yard (which rarely leaves London these days). I enjoyed the use of interviews and reports to give the reader some different points of view. I stayed up late to finish this book. Still, something was lacking. Maybe it was the less than sympathic victim. It's hard to make a 30 year mother unlikeable and deserving of death but Kate Sumner may be that character. The use of only two suspects was at times intriguing but left me feeling a little like a tennis ball after a long volley. I'll admit that I cheated and read the ending ahead of time. That may have actually improved this read since I was concentrating on how they'd unmask the killer, not who was the killer. The police procedural part was fairly interesting.
Rating:
Summary: Exciting and Mysterious
Review: Walters added in a murder/mystery with a love story to attract all kinds of readers. Even if you are accustomed to reading only love stories, The Breaker can still be a book you would enjoy. It may even attract you to different genres of books. From the very first page, Walter's is able to capture the reader's attention and still keep them guessing until the end. This thriller begins with a woman who is raped and murdered by an anonymous killer and later discovered on an almost deserted beach. "She drifted with the waves, falling off their rolling backs and waking to renewed agony every time salt water seared down her throat and into her stomach. During intermittent periods of lucidity when she revisited, always with astonishment, what had happened to her, it was the deliberate breaking of her fingers that remained indelibly printer on her memory, and not the brutality of her rape." (prologue) The Breaker was an interesting book that I would definitely recommend.
Rating:
Summary: The Breaker
Review: The Breaker written by Minette Walters is an okay book. The beginning of the book is really good. It goes through talking about suspects. As the book goes on you start realizing whom the suspect is. Before the book gets halfway done you know who the killer is. That makes the end of the book bad. By the time it gets to the end there is no point in finishing it. If she would've let the climax wait till the end it would have been a great book.
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