Minette Walters

This is a sequel to The Swift and The Harrier. I was totally engrossed by the horrendous events surrounding The Bloody Assizes in 1685-1688. As always, though, Walters' characters drew me in. Highly flawed multi-dimensional characters come alive in her skilful depictions of the times. Nothing about their lives or motives is simple or cut and dry - and the title from the Shakespearean quote is so apposite ... 'All the world’s a stage, and all men and women merely players…’
Lady Jayne show more Harrier (the memorable protagonist from The Swift and The Harrier) and the younger Althea Ettrick are strong characters - unorthodox, intelligent, articulate, and courageous.
Let's hope we see more of both in a future book. show less

As a fan of Walters’s work I had this on my list at the library without reading the description. When I got home and read it I had my doubts about whether I’d get through it. The set up calls for extreme cruelty and revenge and if given without much detail I’m ok, but lengthy descriptions of torture and degradation and the pleasure the perpetrator got from it is something I can’t endure. Luckily I didn’t have to. Yes, Muna’s experiences are specific and terrible in the extreme, show more but that’s not the focus of the book. The idea is that monsters beget monsters. It’s kind of a riff on Cinderella, but without the prince or the fairy godmother.

Muna is young and so completely uneducated that she is passed off as brain damaged by her abductors. When the youngest member of the family goes missing and the police are called, Muna is passed off as a daughter, not the slave she is. Still, the people who meet her have their doubts. Nothing comes of them, but Muna sets things in motion to get free of the cruel Master and Princess who abuse her and control her every minute and movement. Or so they think.

As a revenge tale it works, but Muna isn’t entirely sympathetic. She’s manipulative, subversive, pitiless and violent. All things, as she keeps explaining, that her Master and Princess have created in her. She is a product of isolation, cruelty and fairly savage physical and mental abuse; what can they expect of her except the same? There is no noble aspiration here; she doesn’t want to punish, she wants to get rid of her “family” and live off the system as best as she can. It’s easy to understand, but hard to condone.

The book reads quickly and is sufficiently alien to keep you off balance. The final ending though, the letter that comes last, I found awkward since it has no resolution and no upshot. I think things could have finished well enough without it. show less

Walters goes her own way when it comes to constructing psychological thrillers. This one is presented as a woman trying to right a wrong from 20 years ago and all of the frustrations with trying to find the witnesses, evidence and lies. It’s a difficult book to read because it concerns all that is most wicked about the human species. Racism is at its heart, but there’s misogyny, cruelty (to humans and animals), torture, alienation and betrayal. Our narrator, only known as M, tried to get show more justice for her neighbor Annie when she was killed in the 1980s, but everyone turned on her, even those who should have protected and championed her most. If it was her husband Sam who was determined to get Annie’s death called a murder, he would have been listened to as would any man. Because it was a woman though; she must be crazy, hysterical and delusional. Of course. M doesn’t wallow in it anymore and instead pursues the crime with obsession that can only fuel revenge. The thing is, I don’t know if her revenge was worth it or if she just ended up hurting herself more. show less

In a small village in southern England, an unpleasant rich woman is murdered. No shortage of suspects: Mathilda Gillespie hasd a lot of enemies, many of whom were intricately bound to her by blood, lies, or both, and many of whom end up disliking our protagonist almost as much. That protagonist is Sarah Blakeney, a local doctor whose mild kindness to Gillespie is inexplicably rewarded by inheritance of her whole massive estate. Hence the dislike and suspicion: those who think they ought to show more inherit are rarely well-disposed to those who in fact do.

I’ll come back to the protagonist in a minute, but I just want to dwell a little on the genre. You might call this Dorset Gothic. There’s a lot of murky stuff happening in these quiet villages, especially among the posh, who care so much about social appearances. You can probably guess the sorts of things we’re talking about: abortions, incest, child abuse emotional and physical, drug habits, etc etc. As it all piled up, I did wonder if it wasn’t perhaps too much: you don’t have to hit every one of the beats. But there’s undeniably atmosphere, dark and claustrophobic.

Now, I mentioned a protagonist, and ostensibly we do have one: that fortunate doctor. But it’s a more complicated than that. It’s never quite clear who’s in de facto charge of driving forward the murder investigation: Blakeney, or the actual police detective assigned to it, or less often some other characters, variously seem to be doing the work. This lack of clarity is in part because the close third person point of view of the book keeps changing. We look over the shoulders and inside the minds of lots of characters, and the various bits of information that come together to solve the mysteries of the book accumulate gradually in our mind, but not at the same rate in the minds of the characters. It’s a really neat device and really nicely done. It’s especially effective when we learn a fact from one character, then switch to the point of view of another, who, ignorant of the fact, confidently thinks or acts speculatively about it and gets things badly wrong. This happens a few times. It’s a smart way of highlighting the hubris of the imperfect characters that one’s drawn.

They are indeed all imperfect, none more so than Blakeney’s tenuously estranged artist husband, who rather unfortunately turns out to be the best of them all: the dashing hero when needed, the best navigator of the moral byways, the smartest deductive cookie. Why unfortunately? Well, because all this is ostensible, on the surface of the authorial intention: but the actual action goes against the grain, and reveals Blakeney as really a bit of a knob. It’s like Walters developed a crush on the character that blinded her to what she was actually writing about him. This adds to the faint sense of social conservatism that lingers around the novel: we can have a feisty female protagonist, but in the end, the husband sorts things out. We can also have slightly tedious ethical discussions around issues like abortion.

All this is minor complaint, though. I enjoyed the book and I wouldn’t mind a little more Dorset Gothic sometime. show less