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Summary
Summary
In this electrifying new novel from the bestselling author of The Devils Feather, British lieutenant Charles Acland returns home from Iraq, but his serious head injuries are only the outward manifestation of a profound inner change.
Author Notes
British mystery writer Minette Walters began her literary career as a sub-editor at a romance publishing company. She wrote short stories and romance novels for a time before turning to writing mysteries.
Her first mystery novel, The Ice House (1992), won the John Creasy Award for Best First Novel. Later novels have also been award winners. Scold's Bridle won a CWA Gold Dagger and The Sculptress (which was made into a BBC television play) won an Edgar Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
One look at Lt. Charles Acland's disfigured face and anyone can see that the Iraqi bomb that blew up two of his men has left him profoundly changed-but have his traumatic brain injuries altered the young British army officer's personality enough to make him a murderer? That's the narrative fuse Edgar-winner Walters (The Devil's Feather) lights to ignite this sizzling psychological thriller. She skillfully interweaves strands of Acland's story, including notes from the military psychiatrist treating him, with the hunt for a serial killer who's claimed at least three victims in South London. Then another man is beaten within an inch of his life not long after Acland's move into the neighborhood. When the lieutenant gets into a near-fatal bar fight with a Pakistani stockbroker, Acland's unlikely savior is a 250-pound lesbian weight lifter and doctor named Jackson. Surprisingly, Jackson is also one of the few convincing characters in this plot-propelled tale, a flaw readers may be willing to ignore-until they slam into a contrived denouement well below Walters's usual standard. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A wounded veteran of the Iraq war returns to a London landscape just as threatening. Since his Scimitar tank was bombed, Lt. Charles Acland, the sole survivor, has been in no mood to brag about his alleged good fortune. He's sustained serious head injuries, lost an eye and become even more skittish about being touched than he was before. Even so, hospital psychiatrist Dr. Robert Willis notes that he's resolute in expressing his wishes about practically everything. On one point he's especially adamant: He wants no further contact with Jennifer Morley, the stage actress with whom he broke off his engagement just before he left for the front. In the fullness of time she turns up at his bedside, and sparks fly over the sharply differing accounts the two lovebirds offer of their relationship and its abrupt ending. What does their abortive romance have to do with the murderous attacks on a series of inoffensive men, most of them gay or bisexual? For a long time it seems that the only connection is that they're all in the same book. But Det. Supt. Brian Jones, who heads the inquiry into the beatings, finds more and more links that can't be coincidental, especially after Acland, who's checked himself out of the hospital and fallen in with a no-nonsense lesbian physician and her pub-owning partner, turns out to be connected to three different victims: one who drank at his pub, one he quarreled with shortly before the victim was attacked and one whose cell phone he gives the police. Despite the red herrings provided by a diabetic young runaway and the homeless man who befriends him, the net tightens around Acland, whose torment is so piercing he might be a holdover from Walters's last outing in Iraq (The Devil's Feather, 2006). Forget the tangled mystery. The dance of death between Acland and his ex-lover is harrowing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Walters' latest suspense tale mixes the creepiness of that old noir movie The Lodger, in which an isolated man may or may not be Jack the Ripper, with a contemporary, ripped-from-the headlines exploration of the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury on soldiers. A British lieutenant in Iraq, a victim of a roadside bombing, is left with traumatic brain injury, horrific deformity on one side of his face, excruciating migraines, and a profound depression and suspicion of others. The first portion of the book chronicles the efforts made by psychiatrists to save Lieutenant Charles Acland from his wounds and his despair and to re-orient him toward civilian life. Walters makes even this clinical overview into a suspenseful struggle, as Acland resists all efforts to save him. Questions that haunt the second portion of the novel arise, as well, centering on his reaction to any mention of his former fiancée. Acland seeks reinstatement in the British armed services, is refused, and drifts into a lonely life in London, punctuated by bizarre bursts of anger and fighting. Later, Acland's well-documented reentry problems and his unprovoked attacks on others make him a natural suspect in a series of murders in London. Solid plotting, superb characterization, and fascinating information on traumatic brain injuries make this compelling thriller a sure winner.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The shades of Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair must have been looking over Loren D. Estleman's shoulder when he wrote GAS CITY (Forge, $24.95). Set in a Midwestern metropolis that grew up around a refinery, his muscular novel initially takes a long view of the cynical bargain struck between civic leaders and organized crime - and only moves in for the kill when a key figure in this devil's dance decides to reform. Like earlier muckraking writers, Estleman is always looking for the tipping point where our frontier values of independent entrepreneurship and community justice tumble into criminality. And his characters never stop asking whether it's possible to go back and get it right. Everyone in Gas City seems to be in on the deal that keeps crime and vice confined to 10 downtown blocks, well away from the commercial and residential districts. Francis X. Russell, the corrupt chief of police, is actually best friends with the mob boss Tony Z. But when Russell's beloved wife dies, he goes into mourning for the lost ideals of the generations of immigrants who built his working-class city and resolves to make peace with his conscience. Police raids close down the most notorious criminal establishments. Illicit income dries up for gangsters and cops on the take. Fortunes shift in the coming mayoral race. But once the delicate powersharing mechanism held by Gas City's legal and illegal bosses breaks down, so does municipal order. At this point, Estleman has to ask whether one crooked cop's personal reformation is worth the chaos it causes. It's a loaded question, since the author has made individual (and perhaps national) redemption his central theme, even to the whimsical point of extending it to a serial killer known as Beaver Cleaver, who has shifted his pattern of butchery. ("My theory," a criminal profiler says, "is he's trying to cut down, like a smoker or an alcoholic tapering off his intake until he's beaten the addiction.") While this parallel plot isn't entirely integrated into the main story, it lets more raffish downtown characters into the mix, adding their irreverent voices to the higher debate over how much it profits a man to build a shining city and lose his faith in himself. Before she loses her nerve in a way that a true queen of the night (like Ruth Rendell or her alter ego, Barbara Vine) never would, Minette Walters spins a gripping tale of suspense in THE CHAMELEON'S SHADOW (Knopf, $24.95). Sticking to her habitual method of storytelling, Walters draws all eyes to Lt. Charles Acland, a 26-year-old British soldier who is gravely injured but escapes death after his armored vehicle is obliterated by terrorist bombs in Iraq. From the time he's first met, badly disfigured and sullenly silent on a hospital ward, Acland commands our attention, which only intensifies as he reveals the anger, grief, guilt and rage that torment him. Walters's portrait of this wounded soldier is so persuasively shaded that when he comes under suspicion as a serial killer we're forced to examine the existential question of whether a personality can truly be destroyed - and what that says about military combat. Unhappily, the story's sensationalism undermines this character study, while the procedural format, with its routine police work and inept cops, only distracts from the deeper issues this psychological thriller raises. The perverse tones of Madeline Dare rake their fingernails across the mental blackboard in THE CRAZY SCHOOL (Grand Central, $23.99). And how nice it is to hear that rebel voice again. After making her nervy debut in "A Field of Darkness," Cornelia Read's renegade debutante took to the hills of New England, and here she is in 1989 in the Berkshires, teaching at the Santangelo Academy, a "therapeutic boarding school" for the troubled progeny of the filthy rich. In addition to appealing to "all manner of seekers and lost boys, wild girls and pagan sprites," and those misguided souls who would teach them more practical social skills, the region also attracts a murderer who kills two students and makes the deaths look like a double suicide. Only the iconoclastic Madeline, who really cares about her vulnerable charges, is skeptical enough to see through the sham. While hardly taxing, the whodunit plot is funny and twisted, and it gives Madeline plenty of opportunities to air her caustic views on the evolutionary decline of her social class. As alluring as it is disorienting, THE RISK OF INFIDELITY INDEX (Atlantic Monthly, $22) introduces American readers to Christopher G. Moore's exotic private-eye mysteries set in Bangkok and featuring an American expatriate named Vincent Calvino. While hard-pressed to maintain his own moral ballast within this permissive society, Calvino has a sense of irony that allows him to work for ex-pat wives who want sordid proof of their husbands' infidelity in the Thai capital, which ranks No. 1 internationally as the "hub of marriage destruction." But this cynical private eye also has a streak of integrity (and a need for cash) that compels him to take up the cause of a client who was murdered when he tried to expose a case of drug piracy so farreaching it could bring down the government. Although the tone of the narrative is slightly off - the general satire seems a bit too blunt, and downright mean in its specific consideration of those expat wives - Moore's flashy style successfully captures the dizzying contradictions of this vertiginous landscape. In Loren D. Estleman's latest novel, a corrupt chief of police tries to make peace with his conscience.
Library Journal Review
A British soldier recovering from head injuries sustained in Iraq becomes increasingly isolated, giving way to rages directed mostly at his former fiancee. Is he responsible for a string of recent murders? (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.