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The Devil's Feather |
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The Devil's Feather |
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基本信息·出版社：Alfred A. Knopf
·页码：560 页
·出版日期：2006年08月
·ISBN：0330436481
·条形码：9780330436489
·装帧：平装
·开本：32开 Pages Per Sheet
·外文书名：魔鬼的羽毛
内容简介 With private security firms supplying bodyguards in every theatre of war, who will notice the emergence of a sexual psychopath from the ranks of the mercenaries? When five women are brutally murdered in Sierra Leone, Reuters correspondent, Connie Burns, questions the arrest of three rebel soldiers for the crimes. No one listens. In the wake of a vicious civil war which saw hundreds of thousands killed and displaced, the rape and murder of women is of little consequence. And who cares if child soldiers are beaten into a confession? With little to go on, except her witnessing of a savage attack on a prostitute, Connie believes a foreigner is responsible. A man who claims to have been in the SAS and works as a bodyguard to a Lebanese diamond trader. She remembers him from Kinshasa when he was a mercenary for Laurent Kabilas regime, and she suspects he uses the chaos of war to act out sadistic fantasies against women. Two years later in Iraq, the consequences of her second attempt to expose him are devastating. Terrified, degraded and destroyed, she goes into hiding in England and tries to rebuild the person she was before being subjected to three days of conditioning in a Baghdad cellar. In the process, she strikes up a friendship with Jess Derbyshire, a loner whose reclusive nature has alienated her from the rest of the Dorset community where she lives. Seeing parallels between herself and Jess, Connie borrows from the other woman's strength and makes the hazardous decision to attempt a third unmasking of a serial killer - knowing he will come looking for her.
作者简介 Minette Walters is England’s bestselling female crime writer. She has written 11 novels and has won the CWA John Creasey Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award and two CWA Gold Daggers for Fiction. Minette Walters lives in Dorset with her husband and two children.
媒体推荐 书评
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. British author Walters''s harrowing 12th psychological chiller spotlights violent suffering and hard-won triumph for Connie Burns, a 36-year-old Reuters war correspondent who crosses a sadistic mercenary alternately identified as John Harwood, Kenneth McConnell and Keith MacKenzie. When she finds MacKenzie training Iraqi policemen in Baghdad in 2004, she links him to serial killings in Sierra Leone two years earlier. An enraged MacKenzie kidnaps, tortures, rapes and releases Connie, who is then too traumatized to coherently divulge details of her abduction. She retreats to a country house in Dorset, where she puzzles over the troubled past of the house ("a place of anguish") and hesitantly befriends her neighbors, the handsome Dr. Peter Coleman and Jess Derbyshire, a reclusive young woman who helps Connie heal from her ordeal. While she gradually recovers, she also lives with the surety that MacKenzie will come after her again. Walters (
Disordered Minds) delivers an intense, engrossingly structured tour de force about survival and "the secret of freedom, courage."
(Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From The New Yorker In this uneven but scary thriller, Connie Burns, a white Zimbabwean war correspondent for Reuters, investigates five gruesome murders in Sierra Leone and follows a hunch, convinced that a British mercenary is using the mayhem of war zones to disguise his taste for raping and killing women. After a mysterious assailant kidnaps her and holds her prisoner for three days in Iraq, she becomes convinced that her quarry is now hunting her. She flees to Dorset, rents an isolated house that turns out to have a troubled history, and is befriended by a reclusive neighbor who, some years before, lost her entire family in a car crash. Given the ultra-contemporary world of the early part of the novel, the scenes in Dorset, where the author herself lives, seem parochial, but this does not lessen Walters''s ability to use horror-movie logic to terrifying effect.
Copyright © 2006
Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From AudioFile A sexual sadist murders five women in Sierra Leone. Connie Burns, Reuters war correspondent, is sure she knows the killer''s identity. Years later, she sees him in Baghdad, and then Connie is abducted. After 68 hours, she is released, "unharmed." Connie refuses to talk about her captivity, but her secrecy inevitably overwhelms. Josephine Bailey''s powerful performance pulls listeners into Connie''s anguish. Bailey''s impressive range of accents and a remarkable assortment of voices create a believable (if horrific) scenario. Bailey is a master of subtlety, shading characters with humanity, finessing Connie''s terror and self-doubt, and mirroring the searing helplessness that follows total loss of control. Minette Walters''s wrenching exploration of survivor guilt, post-traumatic stress, and victim psychology and Bailey''s intelligent, restrained reading make this must listening. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition. From Booklist The title refers to the phenomenon of a woman unwittingly igniting sexual passion in a man; the plot follows a woman''s attempts to hide from a sadistic serial killer who has become obsessed with her. At the outset, heroine Connie Burns is a war correspondent for Reuters in Sierra Leone. Five women have been murdered; Burns suspects a British mercenary, but neither she nor anyone else can prove anything. Burns'' suspicions are heightened during her 2004 posting to Baghdad, where she is kidnapped and held in a cellar. After being released, Burns, shattered by her ordeal, hides in a cottage in England''s West Country, trying to gain some semblance of her former independent self. The novel itself takes a sharp turn from hard-hitting war reporting in the Baghdad section to gothic chiller when the setting switches to England. Barton House, the place Burns chooses to recover, is a spooky, Bronte-like construction, presided over by a strange, lonely woman with a tragic past. Burns, unaccountably drawn to this property when her money and resourcefulness could easily net her a more cheerful place to recuperate, has to deal with post-traumatic stress and the sudden reappearance of the British mercenary. Although the gothic overlay seems a bit artificial, Walters (winner of the Gold Dagger and Edgar awards) really knows how to write convincing, ever-escalating psychological suspense.
Connie FletcherCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
