The Echo [Import] [Mass Market Paperback]

Minette Walters (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 7, 1998

“It was the smell that Mrs. Powell noticed first. Slightly sweet. Slightly unpleasant…It shocked her badly to find a dead man in the corner, his head slumped on his knees.”

When Billy Blake, a homeless alcoholic, is found dead of starvation in Amanda Powell’s private garage in the ritzy docklands area of London, the press arrives in force. But Billy’s story is never told because Amanda refuses to comment, and interest in the unknown wino quickly flags.

Then, six months after Blake’s death, the journalist Michael Deacon discovers that Amanda has changed her tune. Now she is suddenly eager to talk about Billy for Deacon’s feature article on poverty and the homeless. More than eager – she seems obsessed with finding out the real identity of her dead visitor. Deacon’s curiosity is piqued. Why is Amanda taking Blake’s death so personally? Why did he choose her garage to die in? And why is she so anxious to discover his true identity?

The more he learns about Blake, the more Deacon can sense echoes of the homeless man’s life in his own. Echoes so compelling that Deacon can’t let go of the story until he’s learned who Billy Blake really was – and why Amanda is almost certainly lying about her own interest in the dead man.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Minette Walters's expert plotting and her ability to quickly bring a large cast of characters to life put her in the same arena as Ruth Rendell. A homeless man who called himself Billy Blake is found dead of starvation in the garage of an expensive home near London's Thames, and it looks as though he might be a merchant banker who disappeared in 1988 with 10 million pounds. A magazine journalist named Michael Deacon is intrigued by the case and by the missing banker's wife and soon finds that there are much darker overtones to both. Other Walters books in paperback include The Ice House, The Scold's Bridle. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The discovery of a homeless man's body in the garage of a banker's wife leads her?and a journalist interested in the homeless?to find out more about the man. They also reinvestigate the disappearance, years ago, of the banker and a sizable sum of cash. More well-crafted psychological suspense from a master.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 424 pages
• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart (March 7, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0771087543
• ISBN-13: 978-0771087547
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,110,348 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Well-written, convoluted plot: Was this really a mystery?, January 5, 2001

By 

Prometheus (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Echo (Paperback)

Ms. Walters is a wonderful writer and I've enjoyed all of her books. This one is quite different than her previous novels. In fact, I'm not sure it was a "classical" mystery or a social commentary on a variety of subjects (class, family, mental illness, the homeless, homosexuality, male-bonding, etc.). It's a well-written book, but the mystery was somewhat convoluted. About a third of the way into the book, I no longer cared about the mystery. I had a difficult time with Terry: He was far too precocious for 14 years old. I had a bigger problem believing that Terry could recite, verbatim, the conversations he had with Billy Blake; especially those reminisces that dealt with poetry and the "meaning of life" passages. My favorite character: Lawrence. He appears briefly, but it's a wonderful characterization. I loved the British slang, as well. One reason I like Ms. Walters: all of her characters, even her protagonists, are flawed individuals with their own set of phobias, problems, and issues. Will I read her, again? Absolutely.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What is irresistible about these books, December 10, 2001

By 

Joyce L. Tompsett "American expat returned" (San Francisco for now) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Echo (Paperback)

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.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Trying too hard, March 19, 2001

By 

AnnaKarenina (St Petersburg, of course) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Echo (Paperback)

Snappy and interesting in many places, The Echo's flaws make it all the more disappointing. The missing persons based plot starts well but gets more and more contorted until you simply can't follow and don't even care who was pretending to be who to whom and when and why. A couple of the main good guy characters are either totally unbelievable and/or totally off. A 14 yr old sexually & emotionally abused runaway found squatting in a homeless men's doss house transforms into a wise,

supportive, insightful companion who quotes and analyses William Blake. A repressed homosexual who publicly jerks off in people's gardens is just plain creepy and unlikeable. The whole atmosphere is just bland British mystery, to which the author attempts to give a contemporary edge by the use of bad language and gratuitously coarse supposed homosexual slang, but it doesn't really work. It probably made an OK BBC TV series, but for a book like this is trying to be, read one of the better Val McDermid books, or for that matter pretty much any Ruth Rendell book.