Customer Reviews

The Devil's Feather

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Thirty-six year old Connie Burns is the protagonist of "The Devil's Feather," a psychological thriller by Minette Walters. Burns, an Oxford graduate born in Zimbabwe, is a war correspondent for Reuters. Her beat includes a number of trouble spots in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. While she is in Sierra Leone writing about the bloody civil war there, she hears that an attacker raped and savagely killed five women in Freetown. One night, she visits a local bar and spots John Harwood, a Scottish-born mercenary with a reputation for misogyny and brutality, and Burns suspects that he may have had something to do with the Sierra Leone killings. Although she has no proof to back up her allegations, Burns runs her suspicions past her colleagues. She has a few unpleasant words with Harwood before she remembers that she previously saw him in Kinshasa, where he was known as Keith MacKenzie. Why has he assumed an alias, Burns wonders?

Two years later, in 2004, Connie is in Baghdad on a three-month assignment. While visiting an Iraqi police academy, she again recognizes MacKenzie, who is now known as Kenneth O'Connell; he is a consultant on restraint and control techniques for a private security firm. When she questions the spokesman of the firm, Alastair Surtees, about MacKenzie/Harwood/O'Connell, Surtees stonewalls her. Following a hunch, Connie tours Iraqi newspaper offices, looking for stories about raped and murdered women. She finds two pieces describing crimes that Mackenzie may have committed. Connie e-mails copies of the articles to Alan Collins of the Greater Manchester Police, who warns her to watch her back. Unfortunately, the warning comes too late. On her way to Baghdad International Airport, she is kidnapped and held for three days before being released. She refuses to discuss her ordeal while in captivity, and severely traumatized, she returns to England.

The rest of the novel deals with Connie's stay in Barton House, a place that she rents in England's West Country. She distances herself from her friends and family, as well as from her boss and lover, Dan Fry. Her only regular contacts are with Jess Derbyshire, a reclusive woman who is brusque, stubborn, and fiercely independent, and Peter Coleman, a local doctor. Connie's greatest fear is that MacKenzie, the man who abducted and abused her in Iraq, will track her down to finish the job.

"The Devil's Feather" is a strange hybrid. It begins as an intense and gripping drama about Connie's courageous pursuit of a vicious killer. Unfortunately, after Connie takes up residence in England, Walters dilutes the novel's power by introducing subplots concerning Lily Wright, the elderly owner of Barton House, her venal daughter, Madeline, and Jess's family history. To her credit, the author skillfully explores such themes as the effects of trauma on the human psyche, how small town life is tainted by petty gossip and vicious rumors, and the need for women who have suffered abuse to take control of their lives. In addition, Minette Walters is a fine descriptive writer with a deep understanding of human nature. However, "The Devil's Feather" gradually loses its focus and ultimately fails to fulfill the promise of its exciting early chapters.

In Baghdad in 2004, thirty six years old Reuters' war correspondent Connie Burns is stunned when she spots British mercenary Keith Mackenzie training Iraqi police. She recognizes the instructor from an assignment in Sierra Leone two years before where she thinks he raped and killed local women. Irate that she plans to expose him, out of control Mackenzie abducts, tortures, and rapes the journalist before freeing her with a warning that he will always be near to provide her a second lesson.

Connie goes into shock unable to tell anyone what Mackenzie did to her. Needing to mentally heal, she returns to her home in rustic Dorset. She makes friends though it is really that her neighbors Dr. Peter Coleman and fellow recluse Jess Derbyshire refuse to allow her to wallow by herself. With their help she begins to regain her self-esteem and equilibrium, hoping to prepare for when Mackenzie using some other name as he has in the past will come to reeducate her.

As always Minette Walters provides an intense psychological suspense thriller that grips readers from the opening moments as the villain takes away a sense of purpose and freedom from the reporter. The tale never slows down as Connie tries to recover mentally from his assault while knowing deep in her soul he is coming for her which keeps readers in a state of anticipation awaiting their showdown. THE DEVIL'S FEATHER is Ms. Walters at her tense writing best.

Harriet Klausner

Reuters correspondent Connie Burns is used to being in the thick of wars and their consequent horrors, but is convinced that the brutal rape and murder of five women in Sierra Leone, is down to a British soldier-of-fortune who goes by various aliases. He is known to be a savage, woman hating brute who kills and mutilates for the sheer pleasure it affords him. Connie is abducted and held prisoner for three days before she is released, unharmed, but is traumatised to the point of incoherent speech and thought. She refuses counselling, as she has been shocked into the very state that her captor wished, that of a shamed, humiliated woman who blames herself for not being stronger. She leases a large house in a small village in an attempt to hide from her tormentor, making the acquaintance of only a small number of the locals who subsequently become drawn into her story and she into theirs. I can see this book becoming a movie thriller with lots of tension and mysterious happenings in the old mansion. It's a great read !!

Being a fan of Minette Walters, I was surprised and disappointed to find that this is a Walters book not worth reading. It begins with a bang but quickly descends into a long drawn out story with numerous sub plots about a village and its eccentric inhabitants that have nothing to do with the primary story. The ending picks up a little, but by then I found it hard to care whether, Connie, the heroine ever makes it back from her mental decline to save the day.

Those who have read each of Walter's previous books will welcome this one: it is amongst the best she has written recently.

Apparently, a 'Devil's feather' is a woman who stirs a man's interest without realising it - the unwitting cause of sexual arousal.

Ms Walters keeps this story moving at a rapid pace, and it is difficult not to get caught up in a sequence of events that seem possible if not probable.

I like the twists and turns, and believe that the characters and situations described work well. A page turner, and one that I highly recommend.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

While Edgar winner Walters' psychological thrillers (in the Ruth Rendell vein) are among my favorites, this is her weakest effort to date. British war correspondent Connie Burns recognizes a sadistic mercenary while on assignment in Iraq. She had met the man while in Sierra Leone two years earlier and, based on his reputation for brutality towards the native prostitutes, suspected him of the vicious murders of five women.

Though nothing came of her suspicions, she immediately resumes her digging when she spots him in Iraq under a different name. His employers stonewall her investigation and shortly thereafter she is abducted, then released after three days. Though she refuses to discuss her ordeal we know who grabbed her and as the book proceeds nothing about her horrible experience comes as a surprise.

Traumatized, she holes up in an old house in Dorset (where Walters lives), suffers panic attacks and edgily befriends a taciturn local woman who as a teenager lost her family in a car crash. The predictable stalking by the kidnapper overshadows the subplot concerning this woman and the elderly owner of the Dorset house, while the protracted ending is first, not credible, and second, way too talky. A major disappointment.

-- Portsmouth Herald

Having been totally captivated by every Minette Walters book that I have picked up in the past, The Devil's Feather came as a huge disappointment to me. It has to be the most unthrilling "thriller" that has ever appeared on my bookshelves.
It took some stamina to plough through nearly five hundred pages of the fictional ramblings of a self-obsessed woman who doesn't trust anyone around her and just moans and groans about her circumstances. To be fair to the author, there are a couple of chapters of action towards the end of the book, but they are far from convincing and I was willing the protagonist to put the narrator out of her misery. Sadly, she survived to inflict more tedium on the reader.

Had this been Minette Walters's first novel, she would have sunk into oblivion along with thousands of other wannabe authors. Let's hope that her next effort returns to her usual brilliant standards.

It is about 1:30 in the morning, and I just fininshed reading this book. I had put it down when I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore, but I woke up and remembering I only had about 10 pages left, I turned the light on and finished it!

This book is so good, the tension I felt as I was reading it was so high, at one time, I had to put the book down and walk away for a while, I found I just needed a break! Ms. Walters has written yet another wonderful book, with characters I really cared about, and a villan that was so scary and so real. This is one you don't want to miss.

Frustrating! Although it begins with a very good premise, once Connie hides out in the country the entire story becomes one big YAWN! Illogically this veteran war correspondent isolates herself in a "cute" country village where eccentric characters spend a lot of time taking up the pages with stories of weasels, thwarted love interests, personal tragedies of years gone by and farm life. There is absolutely no suspense and Connie is one of the most irritating characters I've come across in a long time. She spends a lot of time trying to figure out what she can use as a weapon should her enemy show his face. A pole from the attic, a broken bottle, a kitchen knife, an ax and on and on ad infinitum. CLUE: Perhaps you would not need a weapon dear if you had taken another course of action, say like staying in London where you are surrounded by people and telling your story to others loudly and often. The most logical action for a veteran of the horrors in Freetown, Iraq and the far east would have been to SCREAM out to the world press her story and have the guy's picture splashed on every front page. But then of course there would have been no need to go on and on with Connie and her paper bag breathing! Please someone tell me how it ends because I cannot bear to read another page!

In Iraq, war correspondent Connie Burns sees a familiar, troubling face, a man given wide berth years earlier in Sierra Leone, now using a different name, a mercenary training interrogators with dogs. Long-suspecting MacKenzie of perpetrating the brutal serial murders of women in Sierra Leone, Connie begins searching local reports for other such incidents, certain that MacKenzie is still slaughtering innocents under the guise of authority. Before she can confront the man or his boss, Connie is kidnapped and held hostage, released after three days. Traumatized, Connie's response is to flee to the familiarity of the UK, taking a country house in a remote valley, effectively sealing herself off from the world and the experience that has undermined her confidence, leaving her powerless and vulnerable.

It is a reclusive neighbor who recognizes the extremity of Connie's condition. Jess Derbyshire is an outcast in Barton Winterbourne, farming the land owned by her family, who were all killed in a tragic accident, leaving the girl to face life on her own. Indeed, Jess has coped, but on her own terms, her only companions the mastiffs that follow her everywhere. It was Jess who constantly looked in on the owner of Connie's rental, an elderly woman who has been put into care for advancing dementia. There is no love lost between Jess and Madeline, the woman's daughter, but Connie hardly knows what to make of this bitter feud rooted in secrets, Madeline passing on vicious gossip, suggesting Jess' instability. In this setting, Connie struggles with her crushing fears, dreading the memory of those terrible days of captivity and submission at the hands of a monster. Of course, the worst comes to pass, MacKenzie intruding finally on Connie's carefully constructed hiding place, shattering her security and threatening Jess and a local doctor.

As the past rushes in to reclaim her, Connie must confront her demons or suffer the consequences, the lives of her family hanging in the balance. Walters works her magic with this protagonist, exploring the nature of torture and the random violence of war, the psychic damage inflicted by fear and the slow recovery of a mind damaged by absolute terror and the instinct to survive. In the bucolic countryside, evil intrudes and two incredibly resourceful women, as eccentric as any of Walters' characters, deal with the menace that would annihilate them as well as a grueling investigation of disbelieving inspectors. Heroic in the face of adversity, Connie draws strength from her friend and from the rage that has consumed her, reclaiming her place in the world. When violence reaches out from Iraq to the Dorset coast, Connie learns what it means to be a victim and what it means to survive your worst nightmare. Once again, Walters illustrates that terror knows no boundaries. Luan Gaines/2007.