Make no bones about it, Minette Walters is a great writer. For middle-class murder and mayhem, she can't be beaten - that is, when she's on form, as in "The Ice House" and "The Dark Room" - two gripping stories with strong female characters, to whom you are sorry to say goodbye on the final page...
But then, Walters has also written much weaker novels like "The Echo" and "The Breaker", neither of which were very interesting or involving and which I had to plod through...
"Fox Evil" is somewhere in between the two - it has some great characters and the opening few chapters of the novel set things up for a cracking plot... and then it all goes awry... I was really quite disappointed with how the book panned out. As other reviewers have said, the ending is quite a disappointment. Walters has in the past given her books quite open endings, leaving us wondering what happened next... did X really kill Y? etc... but this one is simply an anti-climax (and it's a struggle to get there).
It's disappointing, from an author like Walters - who can be truly, sensationally, jaw-droppingly awesome in her writing at times - that this book doesn't go anywhere and that the twists we seem to be promised never really materialise. A few of the characters here, most notably the travellers and the snooty villagers, are pure caricature, and I know that MW can do a lot better. I liked Nancy Smith - although she is no Jinx Kingsley (from "The Dark Room").
All in all, a missed opportunity, and I've given it 2 stars because I expected a lot more from this particular author and was disappointed - it's not, all in all, a bad book, just a rather frustrating one. I hope "Disordered Minds" sees Ms Walters back on form!
