Walters, Minette: The Echo

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The mystery is, why would a homeless man seek out the residence of a certain Amanda Powell, an apparent stranger, and starve himself to death in the privacy of her garage within a few feet of a full freezer? The dead man in question was one Billy Blake, an apparently well-educated, 60-something (by the look of him) drunk, an occasional thief and, by his own admission, a one-time murderer. Billy slept in an abandoned warehouse by the river with a bunch of others in similar straits. He preached redemption, raved like a lunatic when he was drunk, mortified his flesh occasionally, and acted as mentor to an intelligent but under-educated homeless minor.

The case of Billy's death interests journalist Michael Deacon, the principal character of Minette Walters's The Echo. Michael winds up investigating the connections between Billy's death and a pair of celebrated disappearances: the embezzler James Streeter, who may have been murdered, and the diplomat Peter Fenton, who vanished after his wife killed herself. Walters's story is complex and not always easy to follow, though the plot is summarized neatly at the end so that one puts the book down, at least, with a fairly clear sense of what happened in it.

The book is, on the one hand, very impressive: Walters has created a very credible world, peopled by credible characters. Reading it is rather like watching one of those gritty British police dramas in which the characters all have heavy accents and you're not really sure what's going on, but the acting's so good that you keep watching. (In fact, The Echo was made into a BBC1 drama in 1998; I haven't seen it, though, so don't know whether it's in fact just that sort of gritty police drama.) The problem with the book, however, is that reading it is such hard work. The book, even though only 338 pages long, feels close to interminable. This isn't helped by the inclusion of a number of transcribed articles and letters within the text that are both dull, for the most part, and written in a minuscule font. The appearance of one such eight-page section at the end of the first chapter--it purports to be an excerpt from a book about unsolved mysteries--is apt to scare away a lot of potential readers.

In sum, a rewarding read if you have the stamina for it. But you might want to have a second book--something frothy and fun--going at the same time.