This book is a complete waste of paper in my opinion; and I failed to appreciate what the reviewers from The Observer, The Daily Mail and The Independent newspapers saw in it when they used such phrases and praise as

• powerful, acute, vivid
• brilliant psychological deconstruction and gripping
• fascinating portrait

Although Walters starts this book in fine style by setting up a story of man who may well have murdered a number of women across Africa and who is known to bully helpless women by punching them in the head. Having set up the story so well, we are then treated to over a hundred of pages of blethering and really tiring wittering.

I can't see why I needed to learn about the potential murderer who then turns out to have been the man who kidnapped and abused the central character, Connie, only to become embroiled in a series of nonsense episodes in the lives of people we never meet and for whom we have no feelings.

The murderer comes back into the story for a while but then disappears and we are treated to even more wittering about those anonymous people. There is a bit of detective work but even that's tiring to read after a while.

Then there are more and more pages of wittering and eventually the arm of the murderer is washed up on a beach or some such. So he's dead then after he disappeared so cunningly under the very eyes of our three heroes. Well, two heroes because the man hero wasn't really a hero.

Connie is a Reuters journalist and her personality comes rocketing through the book: a complete nonentity. Her emails are a joke too: who adds a PS to an email? Many real emails are written as relatively short and informal messages rather than the lengthy formal style that Connie uses. Even her father writes an email to her in an unbelievable style.

Why do the main characters in so many books have to be graduates of Oxford these days? Connie was an Oxford graduate, surprise, surprise. How they can be so clueless is a mystery, then! The next book (just published) to be reviewed here has a reference to Oxford within its first few pages too! Why can't some people have gone to Wolverhampton Poly or Farnborough Tech?

Sorry but I should have stuck with my first instinct when I saw the picture of the author wearing a Fedora style (?) hat: a fairly attractive middle aged looking woman wearing what looks to me like a man sized hat put me off.

Stylistics

Walters' writing style didn't generally get on my nerves; but here are a couple of things that did:

stepping up to the plate: baseball analogy that is being needlessly imported
came out of left field: that means nothing to me
bring as in I am going to bring that to your house ... complete rubbish. Why is Walters, with many books to her name, using bring in such a ridiculous way when she means take, as in to take? This is only one step down from asking a waiter, 'Can I get a glass of wine?' to which the answer is, no the waiter will get one for you. A least Walters spared me that.

While I'm at it: at school we used to be encouraged to read in order to expand our horizons, to improve our language, to enrich our vocabulary. These days I read some books and worry that young people are reading them and learning to talk without discrimination in the way that modern authors are writing.

Again not Walters but I've just that G and H alibied each other ... and that He was becoming obsessed about .... Where are our editors and our standards? I'm rapidly becoming a grumpy old man because of all of this language tosh.

Duncan Williamson
14 December 2005