Disordered Minds - Softcover

Walters, Minette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 033042002X ISBN 13: 9780330420020

Publisher: Pan Books, 2008

Synopsis

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 . . .

About this title

Review

Slowly but surely, Minette Walters has been building up her reputation as one of the UK's most penetrating and distinctive purveyors of the psychological thriller. Disordered Minds will add even more lustre to her name. Such books as Fox Evil and Acid Row demonstrated Walters' reluctance to repeat herself in terms of narrative, and her easy command of the various social groups in her novels (upper middle or council estate) is more sure than that of her colleagues and peers.

Disordered Minds builds on her rich mélange of gifts and continues to strip-mine darker areas of the human psyche than most contemporary novelists--literary or otherwise--are keen to tackle. It's the 1970s: a man dies in prison after a controversial conviction for killing his grandmother. Howard Stamp, an educationally subnormal young man, takes his own life, and the case generates movements claiming Stamp's innocence. Anthropologist Jonathan Hughes digs deeper than the police had originally done, and when Jonathan's path crosses that of the elderly George Gardener, long an advocate of the hapless Stamp's innocence, Gardener co-opts Jonathan in an attempt to clear the dead man's name. But there are some frightening consequences, such as the fact that the real killer will not like being put in the frame again.

As always, Walters is interested in far more than the simple mechanics of crime-novel plotting: Despite their differences, Jonathan Hughes finds that the backward Stamp is still something of a doppelganger of himself, mirroring his own disturbed childhood and sense of alienation, while the background of a pending conflict in Iraq throws the personal dramas sharply into relief. This is Walters at her disturbing best. --Barry Forshaw

Book Description

A dark, gripping tale of solitude and evil from the No. 1 name in crime.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pan Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 033042002X
• ISBN 13: 9780330420020
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 608