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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Jun 1999, 351 pages
Paperback:
Aug 2000, 384 pages
Twelve hours after a woman's body is washed up on a deserted shore her traumatized three-year-old daughter is discovered twenty miles away, alone and apparently abandoned.
Twelve hours after a woman's body is washed up on a deserted shore on the south coast of England, her traumatized three-year-old daughter is discovered twenty miles away, alone and apparently abandoned...
But why was Kate killed and her daughter, a witness to her brutal rape and murder, allowed to live? How did the murderer know that the child was unable to speak? And why would Kate, who had a terror of drowning at sea, willingly board a boat?
The obvious suspect is a young actor, a handsome loner obsessed with pornography, who lies about his relationship with Kate. What's more--his sailboat, Crazy Daze, is moored just yards from where the toddler is found.
But as the investigation progresses, police attention shifts to the woman's husband. Was he really on a business trip to Liverpool the night she died? Was Kate indeed the "respectable woman" he claims her to be? Did he love her or hate her......?
More disturbing, perhaps--why does his little daughter scream in horror every time he tries to pick her up?
Minette Walters is "a superior storyteller who plumbs psychological depths with an acuity that......will have readers enthralled," raved Publishers Weekly of The Echo. With The Breaker, she confirms her position as one of the true masters of crime fiction.
Sunday, 10 August 1997 - 1:45 a.m.
She drifted with the waves, falling off their rolling backs and waking to renewed agony every time salt water seared down her throat and into her stomach. During intermittent periods of lucidity when she revisited, always with astonishment, what had happened to her, it was the deliberate breaking of her fingers that remained indelibly printed on her memory, and not the brutality of her rape.
Sunday, 10 August 1997 - 5:00 a.m.
The child sat cross-legged on the floor like a miniature statue of Buddha, the gray dawn light leeching her flesh of color. He had no feelings for her, not even common humanity, but he couldn't bring himself to touch her. She watched him as solemnly as he watched her, and he was enthralled by her immobility. He could break her neck as easily as a chicken's, but he fancied he saw an ancient wisdom in her concentrated gaze, and the idea frightened him. Did she know what he'd done?
...
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