Sue Walker (1)Recensioni

9780141025681

The Reunion is unpredictable and intriguing. The plot, which jumps back and forth in time, is quite complex. The writing is gripping and easy to read, the characters engaging and realistic. This book will have you thinking long after you are finished reading.

An investigation into her father-in-law's death leads Kirsten Rutherford on a harrowing journey through the lovely river valley in Edinburgh and the events, including a double murder , which seem to be related.½

excellent thriller which keeps you guessing until the very end

If one is interested in psychology, or the behavioral aspects of adolescents, then this will be very engaging.

I enjoyed the switching between past and present. Although the patterns were set, the ending is quite a surprise.

It is not full of psychobable, but rather character analysis.

It dragged in the middle, but picked up in the last third of the book. The ending pulled the whole story together. It was worth reading to the end.½

A decent enough holiday read, this story is set on the east coast of Scotland; redolent with mists, storms, high tides and ruins, it would make a wonderful mini-series.

The hero, unlikable and unstable corporate lawyer Miller McAllister, has returned home for the first time in decades for the funeral of his father Douglas, who was convicted of the rape and murder of three teenage girls 32 years ago. The corpses were found on the family’s private island Fidra, where the McAllisters and their close friends the Buchans had spent many idyllic holidays.

After his father’s death, Miller discovers evidence that suggests he was innocent… Together with the monk Duncan and the beautiful Dr Catriona Buchan, McAllister tries to find the truth. The plot is weak and the characters strangely unsympathetic, but the descriptions of the East Lothian countryside and the island, deserted but for the birds, make for pleasant reading.½

After 2 years absence, Kirstin Rutherford returns to Edinburgh to find that her ex-husband's father, Jamie has died 5 months earlier, drowning in The Cauldron in Leith. There is a possibility that Jamie's death was suicide but this seems very unlike the man whom Kirstin remembers and she becomes determined to find out as much as she can about the circumstances surrounding his death.

Some months before his death Jamie had become volunteer head warden for the river and had crossed paths with a group of locals who wanted to use the popular river parks near The Cauldron for parties involving drugs and alcohol. Jamie's confrontations with them culminated when two of them were murdered, and another one, Morag, of the group was accused of the murders, but then released without charges being laid. Jamie had always said that Morag was innocent, but is his own death somehow connected with his determination to prove Morag's innocence?

I read and enjoyed both of Sue Walker's earlier novels THE REUNION, and THE RECKONING, enjoyed them, and looked forward to reading THE DEAD POOL.

I think however in order to enjoy a story, the reader must like at least one of the characters, but, unusually for me, there wasn't one in this book whom I liked, not even the main protagonist Kirstin Rutherford. It seemed to me (and the ending proved it) that her judgement of events and people just was not to be trusted. The rest of the characters, particularly those who held their bacchanalian orgies by the river, playing their games of spiking Morag's drinks, were reprehensible.

Sue Walker decided to tell this story from several angles: with flashbacks to the time of the dual murders - these are dated and in italics so the reader can tell what they are; with excerpts from Jamie's logs and diaries although in fact these are not all that helpful; and then through conversations and confrontations between the various characters.

I'm not sure about what in this novel did not work for me. If I hadn't been curious about who had committed the original murders, and whether it was in fact connected to Jamie's apparent suicide, then I would have been tempted to stop reading. I think it was just that I disliked the characters so much.....½

This story has deeply drawn characters, a well developed atmosphere and an unusual story line. However I guessed who the guilty party was quite early in the book which spoilt it a little, nevertheless a good read.½

Als Innes Haldane op een dag thuiskomt van haar werk, staat er op haar antwoordapparaat een stem uit het verleden. Een verleden dat ze maar al te graag wil vergeten.

Bijna dertig jaar geleden zaten Innes en Isabella samen in de Eenheid, een experimentele kliniek voor hoogbegaafde, ontspoorde tieners. Sindsdien hebben ze geen contact meer gehad. Wat wil Isabella nu opeens van haar? Voordat Innes daar achter kan komen, pleegt Isabella zelfmoord. En ze is niet de enige ex-patiënt die de dood vindt.

This is the 2nd book by this relatively new British mystery writer and like The Reunion is a great mystery. Moving between memories of thirty years ago and the present, Miller McAllister seeks the truth about his adored father who had been convicted of murdering 3 teenge girls when Miller was a child of 11. His father's death brings Miller back to the coastal community in Scotland on the Fife of Forth where he grew up and where his father had been charged and convicted. Was his father the kindly wonderful father he remembered or was he a cold blooded murderer? If he was innocent who was the real murderer? The story is not only a clever reconstruction wherby Miller attempts to find the truth, but a heartbreaking story of childhood loss from which Miller has never recovered.

I highly recommend that any mystery lovers give one of her books a try. She is a treasure and time will tell whether she achieves the height of Ruth Rendell, Minette Walters and other great British women mystery writers.

Sue Walker is a brilliant new British mystery writer. This is her first book (2005). It is a story that takes place in 1977 and in 2003. 7 disturbed, highly intelligent teenagers spent time in an unusual residential treatment centre in 1977 in Scotland. The book includes intriging clinical notes from 1977 and as the book starts following the lives and later contacts in the lives of these now outwardly successful people the tension builds. Something terrible happened when they were together, a tie that binds, a secret they must never tell and must ensure that no one in their group must ever tell.
So far as I know this book and her next book "The Reckoning" has not been published in the US, only the UK and Canada. They are in pb and should be easily available at Chapters,ca or Amazon.ca or any UK online store. I do now see that there is a Harper Torch pb which may be the US ed.

Title: THE DEAD POOL
Author: Sue Walker
Publisher: Penguin
Edition released: June 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7181-4887-4
296 pages
Review by: Karen Chisholm

Kirstin Rutherford returns to Edinburgh after two years. Five months ago her beloved father-in-law Jamie drowned in The Cauldron - a deep pool in the Water of Leith, only nobody had told Kirstin. Divorced from Ross, she finds that Ross has not told her about Jamie's death or his funeral for some strange reason. Even more distressing than not being told, it seems that everyone thinks that Jamie's death was either a tragic accident or suicide, but Kirstin refuses to believe that the man she knew could possibly have committed suicide. Ross is not so sure, positive his father had changed in the months before his death.

The only person who may know the truth is Morag. In the months before Jamie's death he had been working as a volunteer river guide and self-appointed park ranger, and Morag and her crowd of friends were residents along the same part of the river. Their activities - parties, games, drinking and playing hard on the banks of the river had brought them into direct confrontation with Jamie. Despite all his best efforts he wasn't able to curb their behaviour, but when two of that crowd are murdered at the Cauldron - just a few months before Jamie's own death, Morag is accused but finally released from jail due to lack of evidence. Convinced Morag is the key to the truth behind Jamie's death, Kirstin befriends her, but Kirstin soon discovers that Morag is unpredictable to say the least.

According to the bio that came with THE DEAD POOL, Sue Walker is a journalist who has specialised in miscarriage of justice cases and THE DEAD POOL follows that vein of investigation - the testing of evidence and events around the death of all three people - the two murder victims and Kirstin's father-in-law. The author is obviously deeply interested in the subject of how people can seem to be guilty of things even though there is very little actual fact behind the perception. THE DEAD POOL covers the question of whether or not Morag is guilty and if not, who else could possibly be involved. The question of Jamie's death is central to Kirstin's obsession, she desperately wants to understand what happened to her much loved father-in-law, both before he died and how he died.

The other interesting component of THE DEAD POOL was the author's choice to populate the book with a lot of difficult characters. Those of the crowd in which Morag mixed that were still around were mostly unpleasant, over the top, self-involved. This gave an interesting twist to their possible involvement in any of the deaths as even Morag was very hard to sympathise with or even like for that matter. Jamie's son Ross seems almost too good to be true, and a weird sort of user, an uncomfortable character to be around, whilst Kirstin, the central character of the book, was equally disconcerting in many ways. Ultimately the true killer wasn't that hard to pick fairly early on, and whilst a number of the side considerations of possible motives or the vague possibility of collaboration were dangled at points, the resolution with a little bit too much rushing around in the rain without the much longed for mobile telephone gave the book a bit of a flat ending.