Customer Reviews
Excellent plot but what a tedious read... - By: Dr. C. M. Shreeve, 10 Mar 2007 
This is the second Minette Walters novel I have read, the other being The Shape of Snakes, & I got as little pleasure from this one as I did the first. Good points first: brilliant plotting, and, at one level, a gifted mind at work & a fast pace of action. The book held my attention sufficiently for me to finish the story to discover the perpetrator. But oh dear, the disappointment & tedium of the style & presentation...
I like to get right into the feelings, personalities & subconscious of the main players. I like to get to know the police officers, & victim's family (where applicable) & be able to see & feel what is happening from the chief protagonist's viewpoint. My usual feeling on reading a P D James or Ruth Rendell offering is huge admiration - & sadness at having to say 'goodbye' to characters whom I have got to know so well. I didn't feel I knew any of these 'people' who came over more as literary marionettes whom the author manipulated with admittedly consummate skill. Even worse, I did not care a fig for the described suffering of the players, & couldn't empathise with the 2 chief characters at any level.
I finished the book out of curiosity re the plot's culmination - & there were no farewells to be said. In fact I did not feel that the personalities had been portrayed convincingly enough for us even to have been introduced.
The chapters & sub-sections are in the main fairly short & there is minimum description of environment & character. Most of the individuals are hugely dysfunctional & the language almost universallly overstrong for my taste. I think the main male character & the police officers (at least when interviewing suspects) were the only ones not to use frequent expletives as part of their everyday conversation.
In particular, I missed the setting within a timeframe & location with which I could felt an empathy. I sorely missed the great swathes of brilliantly & beautifully written narrative & character description one gets so bountifully from P D James; & the 'surreallly' realistic character & atmosphere evocation typical of Ruth Rendell. I put the book down feeling thoroughly depressed & miserable, & I am unlikely to read another minette Walters novel.
Pretty Good Read - By: Book Worm, 30 Aug 2006 
This was my first Minette Walters book & I will definately read more. I like her style of writing, not over-describing the actions/thoughts of the characters. You know, like.... ' She sat down in the leather chair & swept her long dark hair from her face wishing she was anywhere else'- that stuff makes me nuts!! I thought the book stuck to the point & each character was described with the minimum of fuss. Got a bit lost with the constant referral of dates, in the end I gave up trying to work out when or what did or was supposed to have happened. It didn't detract from the book anyhow. The ending was a surprise, guessed wrong!! The book is well worth a go.
Dark and sinister (warlockb@hotmail.com) - By: B. Jonsson, 15 Nov 2004 
An early Walters, The Dark Room, is not her best work.
It is, however not a bad book,full of surprizes & turnings.
Surviving the suicide attempt, she wakes up in hospital, with only fractions left of her memories of the last few weeks.
People visit her & alll seems to be alright, if it hadn't been for the terror she feels, trying to remember, giving her panic attacks & frightening both relatives & doctors..
Friends visit her & alll agree that she is recovering, when she starts to talk about stalkers in the hospital grounds...
Surely this is just imaginations of a troubled mind..?
As she digs deeper into her memories, frightening things turn up & someone, someone bad, waits for the right opportunity to kill her..
I liked the book a lot, as it was full of surprises, it wasn't that easy to find out the thruth, which is good. A skilled writer makes you guess at just the right moment, not before or after.
Walters is such a skilled writer!
Typical Walters: a dark look at modern, middle-class England - By: , 23 Mar 2004 I love Minette Waltera as a writer & am currently ploughing through her books in the order in which she wrote them. She is a great murder mystery writer & I love the twists at the end of her novels. However, I've always found it hard to like any of her main characters characters - they're alll frail, 'damaged' heroines who aren't as mentallly strong as they think they are & lonely, embittered men. But I guess that just fits in with the overalll rather melancholy tone of her novels. However it does stop her books from giving me that overalll 'satisfied' feeling at the end when the crime's solved, which is what I'm usuallly supposed to feel! The only character I've liked so far is the husband of the heroine doctor in The Scold's Bridle (he was COOL!...but it would have been more interesting if he HAD cheated on her after alll...)
Anyway, I'm reviewing the wrong book! The Dark Room is a real psychological thriller in that its heroine Jinx (funky name, huh!?)has lost her memory after the police drag her out of her car where she crashed it in a suicide attempt. But was it a suicide attempt or did someone try to kill her? The trouble is - her memory's lost & she can't remember anything beyond the 4th of June when her accident occured. The plot thickens when the bodies of her ex-fiancee & her best friend (who ran off to get married) are found in a wood. Did Jinx murder them? Plus there's a curious subplot about prostitutes getting beaten up in the flats where they work. I personallly found this much more interesting compared to Jinx & her problems & I think Ms Walters missed out on a potentiallly fascinating storyline.
Yes the mystery & suspense is good & everything's tightly plotted. The trouble is Jinx is a spoilt brat who's slightly odd & who I couldn't relate to at alll. I also dislike Walters tendency (so far anyway) to wrap up everything in a happy ending (yep, even with book number two The Sculptress!)Still, this isn't a bad book & I recommend it to fans of the crime genre (although for better characters & dialogue I reallly enjoyed The Scold's Bridal!)
An excellent read. - By: , 28 Nov 2001 The room is indeed dark for Jinx, & for us as well, as she tries to make sense of her troubled dreams after recovering from a mysterious car crash that the police insist was her second suicide attempt. As the story widens & we learn more about Jane & her family, we can't help wondering which of them is the more evil. The unveiling, when it comes, explains everything, & fits alll the clues--if only we had known what to do with them at the time, we might have guessed the truth.
Bettye McKee
