Customer Reviews
fabulous - By: RD, 15 Jul 2008 
I seem to be in the minority who think this was a fabulous book. This may have something to do with the fact that I am not a die hard fan of Ms Walters & have only read about 3/4 of her books. If you are you may want to read the reviews by her more ardent followers for a comparison to her older stuff.
From the books I have read I can say she keeps to the same style of writing by which she uses the periodic inclusion of newspaper cuttings or official documents etc to tell the story. It is a method Ms Walters has mastered & doesn't take anything away from the narrative.
The Chameleons Shadow is addictive & gripping as you're always wondering if the protagonist reallly is a killer or not. There is depth of character as each one has their own problems, backgrounds & personalities which are well conveyed. I'd strongly recommend reading this book to anyone who likes a good thriller.
A good read but... - By: biggest Joni fan ever, 08 Jul 2008 
Like many of the other reviews here I too had to keep turning the pages until I finished the book. So far so good. The book, as the reviews state, is about a young soldier badly injured in Iraq. He finds himself in a hospital bed with no memory of what has happened to him. The beginning of the book is gripping. We learn a little about Acland (the young soldier) as the story unfolds. He does not give the impression of being a twenty-six year old - I had to keep reminding myself that this man was not aged 40 plus. The outcome - after many twists & turns - is rather silly & it seemed as though Minette Walters lost interest in what was going on towards the end & delivered a ''quick finish'' just to tie everything up. Having read alll of her books up to date & enjoyed the earlier novels very much indeed, this book was a bit of a let down but having said that - it did keep me page turning rapidly until I got to the last chapter.
I seem to be in a minority... - By: helen, 08 May 2008 ...Because I have to say I reallly liked this novel, whereas most of my fellow reviewers seem to have some (no doubt justified) problems with it. So let me quickly explain what I liked: I thought the characters & their emotional state were very well handled. The anger that Charles feels after being blown up in Iraq strikes me as psychologicallly extremely close to reality. The isolation & personality crisis he suffers are sensitively handled. Of course you could say fair enough but I wanted to read a thriller not a post-traumatic information leaflet. To me, though, the menace, the strange people he has dealings with, the not-knowing which side you're meant to be on, add greatly to the suspense. So in my books, this is a great novel which I think deserves a great many readers.
A mixed bag - By: M. D. Smart, 08 Apr 2008 
When Minette Walters first began her writing career, she produced several excellent novels, particularly 'The Sculptress', but since then she has never quite lived up to that early promise. Her later work has varied in quality from quite good ('The Dark Room') to pretty awful ('The Breaker', 'Acid Row'). Her latest, 'The Chameleon's Shadow', is a bit of a mixed bag; it's definitely an improvement on her previous book, 'The Devil's Feather' & it certainly kept me interested until the end (despite the fact that the killer is pretty obvious from early on), but a number of annoyances meant I didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped.
Lt. Charles Ackland is the central figure in the book, a soldier injured in Iraq who has become prey to unbearable headaches & sudden explosions of temper which are most often directed towards women. Ms Walters attempts to keep us guessing about his true nature, showing his violent side & then revealing some of his difficult history, with which she clearly intends to engage our sympathy. The problem is that she makes Ackland so unpleasant early on - the man is a misogynist, a racist & a rapist - that even after learning what circumstances lay behind his behaviour I found it impossible to sympathise with him. Walters places a great deal of emphasis on his 'macho' qualities - physical strength, a high pain threshold, having 'guts' etc. - but none of these supposedly positive traits excuse the fact that he makes a vicious racist attack early on in the novel, & he physicallly assaults several women throughout the story (some of them aren't exactly likeable characters, but that's no excuse). Yet suddenly we are supposed to see him as an object of sympathy. Others, including the police, are always making alllowances for him, but I found him impossible to like or care about.
Jackson, the female GP & part-time body-builder (I kid you not) is the other main character, & while she is certainly more interesting & appealing than Ackland, she's not very credible. I mean, how many body-building doctors do you know? And how many doctors would calll a teenage patient "retard" to their face, no matter how irritating that patent was?
Another big problem with chracterisation is one that Minette Walters often fallls foul of: her patronising & offensive depictions of the working classes. Ms. Walters must draw her knowledge of ordinary Londoners from the more hysterical aspects of Eastenders. Her working-class characters are usuallly foul-mouthed bigots with criminal tendancies, & their dialogue is completely unconvincing, being a combination of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins & a particularly bad script from The Bill. It makes me laugh in disbelief when reviewers calll Ms Walters a 'gritty' writer, but then they probably have as little experience of the world she's describing as she does herself. She should reallly stick to the comfortable, middle-class world she inhabits as a setting.
I realise it sounds as if I absolutely hated this book, but that's not true at alll. The simple fact is that despite alll these annoyances it's still an engrossing page-turner. It's just a shame about the problems, because it could have been a great crime novel without them. I'll still be picking up Ms Walters' next book - there's no doubt she knows how to tell a story & she's a good writer when she's covering familiar ground. Hopefully one day she'll produce something to equal her early work; we can but hope.
Ending not as good as what preceded it - By: Gloria Feit, 25 Feb 2008 Minette Walters' newest psychological suspense novel focuses on the effects of war, not on those who inhabit the country of warfare, but rather on those who fight the wars, & the horrendous injuries they sustain that affect every aspect of their lives, both physicallly & psychologicallly. The protagonist is British lieutenant Charles Acland, 26 years old, home from Iraq with devastating head injuries, including loss of sight in one eye & total disfigurement of that side of his face, tinnitus, & migraine headaches. Even worse are the resultant personality changes: suspicion of those around him almost to the point of paranoia; outbursts of uncontrolled anger ["red mist" is a recurring phrase]; distrust of nearly everyone, especiallly women; inability to tolerate being touched - whether alll this is the result of post-traumatic guilt over the death of two of the men under him in the same attack or what is termed "the prolonged destruction of a personality," or something else entirely, is unclear. The effects of traumatic brain injury & subsequent antisocial behavior are explored.
When several men in the London area are attacked & beaten to death over a period of several months, & it appears that it is the work of one man, Acland fallls under suspicion. It is unclear to the police, & the reader, whether or not he is in fact the attacker. He unwillingly turns for aid to a woman whose lesbian partner runs a bar in which he has started a fight, a doctor callled merely "Jackson." A fascinating creation, she is variously described as being "the size of a whale" & "over six feet...this wide & looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger," but she earns Acland's grudging respect & becomes his savior, his psychiatrist [though that is not her area of medical specialization] and, ultimately, his friend..
The title derives from (1) Acland being described as, chameleon-like, projecting "different images of himself to different people," & (2) the Jungian definition of a "shadow" as "the dark aspect of personality formed by those fears & unpleasant emotions which, being rejected by the self or persona of which an individual is conscious, exist in the personal unconscious." The view is a disturbing one. I must admit that I couldn't help but feel that the resolution was somehow less compelling than that which had preceded it. Nonetheless, Ms. Walters has again written a gripping & suspenseful novel.
