When Minette Walters first burst onto the scene in the early 'Nineties, she seemed like a breath of fresh air. Her first three books, especially 'The Sculptress', were excellent and her appealing, distinctive style promised much for the future. However, it seems that as her fame and her sales increased, the quality of her writing took a bit of a nosedive. Book number four, 'The Dark Room' was pretty good if rather unconvincing, but 'The Echo' was disappointing and 'The Breaker' absolutely awful. Since then, she has never recovered her early form, and her subsequent books have ranged from passable ('Disordered Minds') to mind-numbingly abysmal ('Acid Row').
'The Devil's Feather' is one of the passable ones, although the beginning seemed to promise more. The book wastes no time in getting to the heart of the story; within forty pages, journalist Connie Burns has unmasked a serial killer (but no one believes her), been kidnapped and abused by him and finally fled to a remote house in the wilds of Dorset to escape him. Of course, we know the killer will eventually come looking for her, and Walters cranks up the tension slowly but fairly satisfyingly. Unfortunately, the long-awaited climax occurs 150 pages from the end of the book, leaving the remainder to clear up a not-terribly-interesting subplot, and the confrontation itself is only described to us in retrospect, thus robbing it of any tension since we immediately know who has survived the encounter. There are also some rather unconvincing shifts in personality and a lot of half-baked psychology which the characters spout to explain their unbelievable actions.
The other problem I have with this book, as with all of Minette Walters' recent books, is the amount of repetition in her work. Character types, themes and personal concerns are used over and over again. There's always a tough independent female who can't bear to show her vulnerable side, the square-jawed professional male who has slept with every woman in a fifty mile radius, the obnoxious introvert who is really sensitive and warm-hearted under that protective shell ... they're all here, as they are in practically everything else she's ever written. The usual hobbyhorses are here, too: the superiority of rural to urban life, dogs (in this book she tries - and spectacularly fails - to convince us the demonic Bull Mastiff is a sweet and loveable breed) and smoking (I'm a smoker myself, but even I can't sympathise with the way her characters are always deliberately blowing smoke in non-smokers' faces). Also as usual, the whole book is shot through with conservative, middle-class values, however much the author tries to convince us she's a forward-thinking liberal. Her treatment of working-class characters has always been offensive, and no matter how hard she pretends to disapprove of snobbery, she exhibits all the signs herself. The way she seems to applaud violent revenge and vigilantism in this book is particularly disturbing.
Perhaps the most surprising example of her repeating herself is the way in which this book is reminiscent of 'The Ice House' in many ways. Isolated females, unfriendly and suspicious villagers, concealed corpses, the mystery surrounding the fate of the central villain ... there are many similarities but I don't want to go into too much detail and spoil the novel for anyone.
I can only hope that Minette Walters takes a break before writing her next book, and tries to rediscover the form which brought her to public attention in the first place. As things stand right now, her formula is wearing very thin.
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