Customer Reviews

Disordered Minds

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Walters is a passionate storyteller, and she always infuses her plots with complex social and family conflicts in an engaging manner. The characters in all her novels are quite interesting, and they each have a ring of truth and vulnerability that makes them appealing to us readers.

The reasons people might not call this their favorite MW book:

--Plot is too convoluted. There are so many characters telling so many different versions of these events! After a while, you get a little frustrated trying to keep it all organized in your mind (although you have to admire Walters for being able to keep it all straight herself).

--Weak ending. Although the pertinent questions in the novel are answered, they trickle in at the last few pages in as weak a manner as possible. There's no satisfying comeuppance for any of the guilty parties.

--Suspects' garrulousness. All the people who were present for the tragic events in 1970 Bournemouth feel compelled to answer our nosy protagonists' questions and accusations. If Roy, Priscilla, or any of the others had been sensible, they would have just said "Huh--I'd like to help, but I'm busy right now."

--Foolish political diatribe. For no reason whatsoever, Walters has one of her characters (George--was that ironic, Minny?) spew silly anti-Bush/Blair emesis on a few pages. It has nothing to do with the plot, and it just makes her seem like a foaming, impractical, and close-minded liberal.

She's Minette Walters, and she's great. Her books have psychological credibility and almost always grip you with an unshakable chill of foreboding until you reach the last page. This one wasn't one of her best, but I'm still keeping my eye out for her next release, The Tinder Box.

I agree with those in the majority who have reviewed this book. It was a terribly boring story and hard to follow at times. I am a huge Minette Walters fan. In my opinion, she's right up there with Ruth Rendell. She normally writes very captivating stories with a true storyteller's touch but this veered off in quite a different direction than anything else I have read by her. The word by word e-mails from one character to another were dreadful. I found myself skimming over them. It appeared to me that they were put there to take up page space because they certainly were not there to enrich the story or provide anything of interest. There wasn't even really a mystery here. It was obvious what was going on right away. I did not care for this book one bit. The two star rating is because I do love this author and one star would just be shameful (although two stars seems generous).

As has been said, this isn't Walter's best book or top third. But it's worth reading for the interplay between Jon and George, who could be further pursued as characters in the future. But the last third of the book leaves much dropped or weakly resolved and lacking in drama. So read it for the characters and the change in writing styles. It's not boring, just a disheartening ending.
Sure doesn't compare to Elizabeth George..

There have been a lot of reviews already written about this book, so won't retell the plot. Several of the people involved, especially Cill, Howard and Louise, had the most horrendous childhoods which contained bullying, beating and parental abuse. This part is not pleasant reading. What I did enjoy however, is the way that Walters developed the characters and especially the interplay between George and Jonathan. Have read all of Walter's books and would not call this the best one but it was a good read.

Sadly, this book was not up to the standard I would expect from Minette Walters. From the title, and from Walters' reputation and previous books, one would anticipate a chilling psychological study. But the psychological elements of the murder are bog-standard for any contemporary mystery--none of the "revelations" were remotely surprising.

Walters also goes to a great deal of trouble, early in the book, to establish that one of her main characters, Dr. Jonathan Hughes, has deep emotional problems. Hughes' background and personality are developed at length over the first 150 pages or so, and then the whole issue basically vanishes. Hughes' long-rooted problems apparently receive a miracle cure when he befriends a vibrant older woman. It's a cliche worthy of bad television.

Then there's the prose. The novel suffers from both flatness and "info-dump." Walters drowns us, early on, in vague sociological generalities that are never given life by the book's plot or characters. She makes the novice writer's mistake of telling instead of showing. The novel's tone is lifeless, and the way the plot develops (endless recountings of a few days' events) doesn't help. There's also a certain element of preachiness about racism, poverty, and the Iraq war, which was enough to get on my nerves even though I largely agree with Walters' politics.

I didn't find the ending as dissatisfying as some other reviwers. It's pretty clear whodunnit; the question is whether they'll get away with it.

Disordered Minds could have been a good novel. The elements are mostly there, but it needed a stern editor and a few rewrites. Perhaps it was simply rushed to publication before it was ready.

This is one of the best mysteries written in the last few years. The characters are remarkable as are the analogies one can draw between them. Meanwhile, the plot is detailed and leaves the reader really wanting to know what happened in the sordid events of thirty years before. The only flaw in the writing is that too many of the characters seem to remember too many of the details from so long ago.

...before I ordered this book. Because Walters has always seemed a sure thing for me, I looked forward to reading this book. As other reviewers have mentioned. the first disappointment was an overlong and "scholarly", i.e., dry and boring, discourse on the case that I almost did not endure. But I stayed with it, waiting for the hook to be set. It never was. Nevertheless, I persevered and finished the book. I was incredulous when I read the last page, turned the page, and realized that there was nothing more.

There is almost no resolution of the many questions that are asked by the main characters, and certainly no satisfaction in the ending. I had reluctantly developed an affection for the two protaganists, one of whom undergoes considerable unexplained character change toward the end of the book.

Many other reviewers have asked the primary question: "Where was the editor?" As authors become more successful, they must be more immune to editing. This book was repetitive and monotonous, and the devices she chose to tell the story (emails, police reports, letters) were cumbersome.

The book might make a good Mystery! episode if well-cast. Perhaps that was the author's intent. If you are a Walters fan, take a pass on this one.

This is an interesting and complex mystery, one that kept me going for a while. The characters are likable (the good guys, anyway), though Jonathan Hughes is tiresome when we first meet him. It seems that the author used this book to go on about the war in Iraq, which is fine had she done it a bit more intelligently. Jonathan, who is half Jamaican and half Chinese, tries to pass as an Arab and gets into some trouble for it in the wake of 9/11. There's a lot of this in the beginning but then the author simply lets it drop, as though years of Jonathan's neuroses are healed by George Gardner, the woman who helps him solve the case. There are some nice scenes between the two of them, especially when they first meet. Overall a good read; I may try another of the series, but I'm not running to the bookstore.

You can usually rely on Minette Walters for a seminar on criminally disturbed minds. There's some of that in this novel but it's way, way too long. Ms. Walters introduces us to an interesting character in George (female), a councillor trying to unravel a couple of long-ago murders blamed on a young man with mental disabilities. She teams up with a professor with an enormous chip on his shoulder.

The two of them go off investigating and the book bogs down into hypothesis after hypothesis after hypothesis. It just goes on and on. If it hadn't been a Minette Walters book I would have put it down unfinished, but I kept hoping it was going to click into gear. It didn't.

Where was the editor? The book could have been whacked down to about half its length.

Councillor Georgina Gardener takes up the cause of reopening the case of Howard Stamp, a mentally retarded youth who was accused and convicted of the brutal killing of his grandmother, 25 years ago. The youth was coerced by police into confessing to the murder, even though the evidence was purely circumstantial and because he was simple minded enough to be browbeaten into saying whatever was easiest. Tragically, Howard suicided in prison after 3 years of being bullied and beaten by other inmates. Being convinced of his innocence, Georgina is determined to clear his name and seeks the help of anthropologist and author, Jonathan Hughes, himself suffering from unresolved issues regarding his parentage and his reluctance to acknowledge his racial origins. At first, there is outright hostility between them but, after working together for a short time, an uneasy truce is struck and they find that they work well together as a team. Delving back into the horrific pasts of the children and teenagers who were invoved with the murder case is like opening a door into hell, full of rage, violence, incest, brutality and everything that is warped and hiseous in the lives of these children and their parents. It's not what you'd call a "nice" read but one which, unfortunately, is not uncommon and gives a big jolt to those of us who still see childhood through rose coloured glasses.