Minette Walters
1994
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
SPOILER ALERT
This
book was great, a real page-turner, up to the halfway point, when it
abruptly started losing my belief and my patience and my interest.
The
story revolves around Olive, an enormously obese woman who is serving a
25-year prison term for the gruesome murder of her mother and sister. A
writer, Roz, is doing research for a book about the murders and ends up
discovering evidence that suggests that Olive didn't commit the murders
after all.
Olive is a disturbed, creepy person who makes voodoo
dolls of clay and candle wax and has to be carefully drawn out to say
anything of value. Roz's initial investigation into the murders was
lively and kept my interest up, particularly when she was interviewing
Olive.
But it all starts to go downhill when Roz gets involved
with Hal, one of the policemen who arrested Olive, who is now retired
and running a restaurant.
Roz’s ex-policeman/restaurateur
boyfriend has problems of his own - a foreclosure-scam lawyer trying to
get him to close his restaurant. As it turns out, the lawyer was Olive’s
family lawyer and had invested in properties (including Hal’s
restaurant) with Olive's inheritance assuming she'd be in jail for 25
years, and now that it appears she might be innocent after all he has to
start breaking people's kneecaps to get the money back. All of this
seemed like an attempt to be twisty that just got too complicated.
Also
the relationship between Roz and the policeman is juvenile and
annoying. When they got together, Roz suddenly became the stereotypical
sassy but helpless heroine. Hal became her stalwart protector and kept
referring to her as "woman", as in, "woman, you drive me crazy."
I
also didn't buy Olive's character change over the course of the story.
She went from being a tough, recalcitrant prisoner who insists she
committed the murders to a soft mush-mouth who cries a lot and is
practically falling over herself to explain everything that really
happened.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the book,
though, if I may hearken back to my politically correct college days, is
its treatment of the Female Body Image. First there is the obvious
contrast between fat, creepy, evil Olive and skinny, sassy, virtuous
Roz. There are also a couple times when Roz gets beaten up – once by her
ex-husband and once by thugs hired to take back Hal’s restaurant. There
is a lot of lingering detail about Roz’s injuries, and her bruises
bring out the lover and romantic protector in Hal in a way that I found
less than comfortable.
This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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