Product Description

In 1970, Harold Stamp, a retarded twenty-year-old was convicted on disputed evidence and a retracted confession of brutally murdering his grandmother - the one person who understood and protected him. Less than three years later he is dead, driven to suicide by isolation and despair. A fate befitting a murderer, perhaps, but what if he were innocent?

Thirty years on, Jonathan Hughes, an anthropologist specialising in social stereotyping, comes across the case by accident. He finds alarming disparities in the evidence and has little doubt that Stamp's conviction was a terrible miscarriage of justice. But how far is Hughes prepared to go in the search for justice? Is the forgotten story of one friendless young man compelling enough to make him leave his books and face his own demons?

And with what result? If Stamp didn't murder Grace Jeffries then somebody else did . . . and sleeping dogs are best left alone . . .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58506 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author

Minette Walters is England’s bestselling female crime writer. She has won the CWA John Creasey Award for best first crime novel, the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best crime novel published in America and two CWA Gold Daggers for Fiction. Minette lives in Dorset with her husband and two children.

Customer Reviews

Disordered Minds
Interesting characters though the plot hook is not as strong as in her other novels. Some editing would have helped as the pace of the novel is quite uneven. The climax is not so much built towards as arrived at.

Disordered Minds
Firstly the book starts with a superbly crafted double-whammy of surprises as Walters immediately questions the readers ability to judge a book by more than its cover. The rest of the book is simply pure enjoyment as two of the most mis-matched "detectives" ever search for the answers to a murder than happened thirty years ago.

Nobody does the "less than perfect" hero (both mentally and physically) better than Minette Walters and this book contains two of the best, but above and beyond that, some of the support characters are simply a joy to read, especially authors agent Andrew Spicer who is a brilliant creation. I also enjoyed the romance element in the book which I felt was very subtle and well crafted and a welcome addition to the storyline.

Any fan of Minette Walters will love this book and any uninitiated Walters readers could do a lot lot worse than start with this one.

A big disappointment
I came to this having just read Fox Evil, which I found tense and gripping, so I had high hopes of Disordered Minds. Unfortunately, they were dashed: this is a poor book.

Another reviewer has outlined the story, so I'll just make a few comments. Because it is built on events that occurred 30 years beforehand, there's a lot of reconstruction to get at what happened then. This relies on what seems like perfect memory recall on the part of the people concerned, and I found this aspect of the story completely unbelievable. In addition, there's endless tedious dialogue attempting the reconstruction, and the characters involved are uninteresting at best, positively unlikeable at worst, and there is absolutely no tension in the book.

I hate to admit it, but I finally gave up on the book at around page 440 (out of nearly 600) and - this shows how completely uninvolving it was - I couldn't even be bothered to read the end to see whodunit.

I wouldn't give up on Minette Walters as a result of this one experience, but another like this and I would become very disaffected.