Rating: 
Summary: The Echo
Review: So far, I have read three of Minette Walters's books "The Ice House", "The Echo" and the "Dark Room". I found " The Echo" lacking a little in the same page turning curiosity of "The Ice House" and "The Dark Room". Although it is a good book on its own I could note help feel it was a little disappointing when compared to her other books which, are very good and what I call "must reads". I find the fact that the central characters and core story lines are very similar i.e. the main character is a strong middle aged intellectual woman (I guess based on herself), the main male character(s) all with varying sexual, and or emotional/metal disorders (I hope not based men she actually knows) makes it much harder to keep you interested. I do not know if this is true for all her books. Although there are one or two ruff points in the plot, I think it is still well worth reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Missed by a Hair!
Review: The secret of an English Mystery is that it examines the mundane lives of its actors through the faculties of the investigators uncovering some plot or solving a puzzle. In that sense the book is fabulous in its exposition of the not so typical average upper class people and people and enlightened outcasts as well a despicable villain or two. The novel fails when the principals become overdeveloped beyond the realm of believable. Towards the end of the story the beloved characters become enlightened and sentimentalized into corniness as if the author fell in love with those people, leaving the audience in the cold. The major shortcoming, though, is that everything is tied up neatly with no suirprises and no loose ends by the end of the novel with critical clues pulled out of the hat with no hint for the reader.
The book is worth reading , a least 3/4 of it for the imaginative storytelling.
Rating: 
Summary: Great characters, living and dead...
Review: This author is just about at the level of Ruth Rendell and her books, particularly the last few, are very highly recommended. I would not put this book among the author's very best - the plotting definitely is interesting but the climax and revelation of the killer do not live up to the promise of the plotting. Nevertheless, the author has created a likeable main character in Mike Deacon, although it is quite inexplicable why he would choose some of the friends he does.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting read
Review: This author is just about at the level of Ruth Rendell and her books, particularly the last few, are very highly recommended. I would not put this book among the author's very best - the plotting definitely is interesting but the climax and revelation of the killer do not live up to the promise of the plotting. Nevertheless, the author has created a likeable main character in Mike Deacon, although it is quite inexplicable why he would choose some of the friends he does.
Rating:
Summary: Good detective story carried out by a journalist.
Review: This book was in its own way very entertaining. Minette Walters gives you as many clues in the beginning that in the end your head is all mixed up. You just have to keep on reading to see if you are right all the time and most of the time you are. This was the first book I read by this author and I was surprised to the positive. All lose ends in many families all seems to end up with the main charachter. It was really good fun reading it and it was one of those books you occupie yourself with for a weekend and then it is finished.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful characters, chilling suspense.
Review: This book was Minette Walters at her best. The characters were extremely human. I didn't like all they did but I liked them all even Barry Grover the pervert. I found myself laughing out loud which is a first for a Minette Walters book. I have liked all of her books, I loved this one. It had me going til the end.
Rating:
Summary: A deep dark psychogical mystery that left me gasping for air
Review: This is the first time I have read a minette walter's novel. And I must say this mystery did'nt live up to my ecpectation. The deep mystery is set in england about a homeless man named billy blake who is found dead in the garage of the rich and mysterious amanda powell.He dies of starvation.The situation pircks the attention of micheal deacon. A reporter for a news paper. He investagates the billy blake and amanda powell. Two un related people who are bound toghether by a mysterious dissapearence of a man named james stretter who got away with 10 million pounds. Along the way deacon meets a 14 year old boy named terr. Billy's friend and the only character with any life like qualities.It is'nt so much of a mystery as a reflection of the society today. This book is filled with flash backs with layerd characters all with problems of there own. In conclusion minette walters gives us a mystery that never really gets of the ground and otherwise doodles around with the characters and there lives. The only thing I found stupid..not stupid confusing should be the word was that every hundred pages or so they kept going to this woman in cape town africa who is totaly unrelated to the story??
Rating:
Summary: Very ineresting but no roller-coaster feeling
Review: Walters does a good job in writing a criminal story about- how interesting- a journalist who takes the police' work on a murder and some other complications,but that's not a Thriller. I did not read the previous books by her but this book was interesting for me, until the last quarter of the story you don't know what keeps the different stories together but then it seems to be clear. I only read real thriller before and so that's a well-done crime story. All in all it is the other side of the stereotyped kind of a crime story: light style by letters and excerpts and the characters are nearls funny: a 14-year old kid whose always smokin' pot, a lone-livin' journalist with two ex-wives, a lawyer who gets support by the journalist, and a chief writer of a magazine with less life value as the employee. Usually the big boss of such a story is the police but here it is the journalist who knows more than a lawyer, a chief writer and a witness. It is an interesting bokk although all this extraordinary things.
Rating: 
Summary: Artificial and unpleasant
Review: Walters' books are typically creepy and sordid. But the sentimentalism between an unlikely 14-years-old sqatter-genius, a twice-divorced decayed journalist, and a repressed gay voyeur is really too much. And all these details on homeless people. Actually, homeless men. Is this a book directed to cheer-up an audience of man-hating women?
Rating:
Summary: What is irresistible about these books
Review: Walters' books remind me a bit of Shakespeare's tragedies if we had come in on the story near the end. We work backwards to find out how they have gotten to this wretched point -- and we usually do meet them at rock bottom -- and then we watch them rise up just a little to grab one more time at their humanity before succombing to their ultimate fate.Walters fascinates me because she starts with a cast of characters who appear to be generally awful people, or jerks. They aren't people we like, nor do we want to like them. And then she unfolds their stories for us, and forces us -- and her other characters -- to look behind the veneer at the more complete individual. Especially when we don't want to. Barry is a good example in this book. While we are sympathetic with his emotional crippling due to life circumstances, we still dislike him. At the same time, Barry is human, and believable, and so we find ourselves drawn, if a bit squeamishly, into his misshapen life. I place Walters with Elizabeth George, J. Wallis Martin, and Ruth Rendell as writers who write dark, psychological mysteries (and to some degree Laurie King's Kate Martinelli stuff fits here too.) They are neither light, nor comfortable, but they do satisfy on a deeper level.
|
