The Breaker

Rating:
Summary: Boring and predictable...
Review: ...and not at all what I expected from Minnette Walters. Where the Dark Room and The Echo and all of her other books are intricate puzzles, bending and twisting in on themselves, this books was sadly plodding and straight forward.

At first, I found the mystery of the dead woman, and the lost little girl to be tense, but the tension rapidly disappeared into boredom. It took me two weeks to read this book, and it never takes me any more than four hours. The back and forth red herrings that led first to the husband, then to the boyfriend, and back again got tired very quickly, especially as none of teh twists were either original, or unexpected.

The only good characters were the rural policeman (his mild romance with the owner of a local stable barely keeping her head above water was the only really interesting part of the book.) and the dead woman, and then only real mystery was teh sea itself.

If you want a good mystery, read The Dark Room, or The Sculptress. Definitely skip this one.

Rating:
Summary: She's a wonderful writer; the mystery is fair.
Review: I agree with most of the previous reviewers that the mystery wasn't too difficult to figure out. I think the present book, "The Breaker," is a wonderful read if you like good writing, but the mystery is a bit stilted. However, I think Minette Walters is a gifted writer. Her characters (both major and minor) jump off the page and the dialogue is believable. In all of her books, she's great at developing her characters. I particularly like the fact that all of them are flawed, even the protagonists. What's really good: She has no reoccurring characters through her books. They're all new and different - a new cast of characters to discover and enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: Solid, not spectacular, bounce between 2 suspects
Review: In many ways, this is a good read. I enjoyed the world of coastal England. It was also refreshing to have the local constabulary solve the crime without Scotland Yard (which rarely leaves London these days). I enjoyed the use of interviews and reports to give the reader some different points of view. I stayed up late to finish this book.

Still, something was lacking. Maybe it was the less than sympathic victim. It's hard to make a 30 year mother unlikeable and deserving of death but Kate Sumner may be that character. The use of only two suspects was at times intriguing but left me feeling a little like a tennis ball after a long volley. I'll admit that I cheated and read the ending ahead of time. That may have actually improved this read since I was concentrating on how they'd unmask the killer, not who was the killer. The police procedural part was fairly interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Well executed .....
Review: Minette Walters offers us the tale of a young woman whose nude and battered body is found washed ashore from the sea while her young toddler daughter is found wandering alone in a nearby village. As events unfold we learn about the suspects: her obsessive research scientist husband and the self-obsessed actor who summoned police to her body. Throw in pornography, drugs, scuzzy friends, and a blossoming romance for the local policeman and you've got the recipe for a well-rounded whodunit.

This was a relatively quick read, but, as with all murder mysteries, details were important. I confess I wasn't certain about the killer's identity until the end. The plot was evenly paced and the personalities of the various characters were well presented.

Rating:
Summary: The Breaker: A unique, murder mystery
Review: The Breaker by Minette Walters is an exciting murder mystery that keeps you guessing to the very end. At the beginning, Walters gives a brief suspect list, and you begin to think that you already know who the killer is, but throughout the book new developments come up that make you question your decision. The Breaker contains a very unique writing style that I had never seen before. Minette Walters includes police interviews, suspect affidavits, and investigation reports. These greatly contribute to the plot because the reader gets a new perspective, one through the eyes of the investigators and townspeople. Normally, the reader sees the story through the eyes of one of the main characters, but in The Breaker I was exposed to multiple views. These helped me to determine who the guilty party was by seeing the entire aspect of their life. If you're looking for a unique murder mystery, coupled with extensive character development and multiple plots, go out today and read The Breaker.

Rating:
Summary: The Breaker: A unique, murder mystery
Review: The Breaker by Minette Walters is an exciting murder mystery that keeps you guessing to the very end. At the beginning, Walters gives a brief suspect list, and you begin to think that you already know who the killer is, but throughout the book new developments come up that make you question your decision. The Breaker contains a very unique writing style that I had never seen before. Minette Walters includes police interviews, suspect affidavits, and investigation reports. These greatly contribute to the plot because the reader gets a new perspective, one through the eyes of the investigators and townspeople. Normally, the reader sees the story through the eyes of one of the main characters, but in The Breaker I was exposed to multiple views. These helped me to determine who the guilty party was by seeing the entire aspect of their life. If you're looking for a unique murder mystery, coupled with extensive character development and multiple plots, go out today and read The Breaker.

Rating:
Summary: The Breaker
Review: The Breaker written by Minette Walters is an okay book. The beginning of the book is really good. It goes through talking about suspects. As the book goes on you start realizing whom the suspect is. Before the book gets halfway done you know who the killer is. That makes the end of the book bad. By the time it gets to the end there is no point in finishing it. If she would've let the climax wait till the end it would have been a great book.

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent psychological thriller
Review: This is the first book by Minette Walters I've read, after borrowing it from a friend to kill time on the train. The book is suspenseful all the way to the finish as the police pick up new clues, but the puzzles don't all resolve themselves coherently, and the motives and behavior of one of the central characters never become clear. The author has a lot of insight and imagination regarding human psychology, and gives her characters very well-defined personalities (with the one exception). It makes the good guys all the more sympathetic, and the crime suspects creepier. As the investigation digs deeper into the victim's background, the book almost becomes too dark to be enjoyable as light reading; but Walters adds a nice romantic subplot to keep things balanced.

Rating:
Summary: A Jolly Good Whodunit
Review: Two young brothers are spying on swimmers through binoculars when the nude body of pregnant Kate Sumner washes up on shore. She has been raped, her fingers broken, but the boys are more afraid that their father will punish them for ogling the women than they are of finding a body.

Then Stephen Harding, a good looking young actor, arrives and reports the discovery to the police. When Constable Nick Ingram shows up, the two men take an instant dislike to each other. To complicate matters, the dead woman's three-year-old daughter, Hannah, turns up wandering the seaside alone.

Nick finds out that Harding, who just happened to be on the scene when Kate's body washed ashore and his sailboat just happened to be moored near where Hannah turned up, has stared in and also collects pornography. And the police soon learn he'd lied to them about his relationship with Kate. Not only did he know her, but they'd had a brief fling, which apparently ended badly.

However, Kate's older husband William can't be ruled out as a suspect, either. Especially when his rock solid alibi begins to come apart. Nor does it help his defense that his daughter won't speak to anyone, has a disturbing knowledge of sexual practices and throws a fit every time he tries to touch her. The question must be asked, Is she frightened by some memory of her father's involvement in her mother's death?

There are enough red herrings in the mix to make us believe each man could be the murderer in this excellent tale, but it's a mystery to me how Ms. Walters can suck you right into a story about such hideous and psychopathic characters. It must be her excellent writing, the way she paints the pictures of this lovely part of the English coast, the way she makes us believe in her people, no matter how much we may dislike them. This is an excellent story, a super mystery, a jolly good whodunit.

Rating:
Summary: Well written but unsatisying mystery
Review: Walter's characters and settings are well developed and intriguing but the book starts to go downhill at the middle. There are only two major suspects and basically the author just flip flops between the two making each suspect appear to be the most likely culprit. This grows quite tiresome by the end and although Walters does a fantastic job at character development, the book could have benefited by being cut by about 100 pages. Most of the major intiguing elements of the story, such as why the victim had her fingers broken, turn out to mean nothing at all. Most mysteries have me racing toward the end of the book at the last 100 pages. It took me three nights to finish this one because I was so tired of these characters. Definately not one of the author's best.