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The Chameleon's Shadow

Author: Minette Walters
Publisher: Pan Books
Category: Book

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Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

13 reviews
Sales Rank: 770

Media: Paperback
Pages: 526
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 6.9 x 4.3 x 1.7

ISBN: 0330449559
EAN: 9780330449557
ASIN: 0330449559

Publication Date: May 2, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days

Also Available In:

•	Hardcover - The Chameleon's Shadow
•	Paperback - Chameleon's Shadow, The
•	Hardcover - The Chameleon's Shadow
•	Paperback - The Chameleon's Shadow (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
•	Audio CD - The Chameleon's Shadow: A Novel
•	Audio CD - The Chameleon's Shadow: A Novel
•	Audio CD - The Chameleon's Shadow: A Novel
•	Hardcover - The Chameleon's Shadow (Thorndike Core)

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Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...

2 out of 5 stars

Disappointing July 25, 2008
Disapppointing. OK I am not a big fan of Walters'style of including some kind of memos, newspaper cuttings, reports into her fiction, designed in a different typo and setting etc. I always found it disturbing and more a distraction from the novel than an addition to it. Anyway, this book is in itself disappointing and thrilling in one go. Sounds strange but that's how it felt to me during reading this story around Lt. Acland, terribly wounded Iraq war soldier returning to the UK after having seen two of his men die in a bombing. He is a very unsympathetic character and the acquaintances he makes on the way during this story are imho too overdrawn too larger than life and through that design almost discriminating some special groups of people. The guilty person comes of course out in the end and I will not disclose here who it is but why this person has done the murders is not made clear, the end is written in a rush after the book drips on for ages. Still, an interesting read, but do not expect too much from it, especially if you have read the early Minette Walters books that were far more better.

5 out of 5 stars

fabulous July 15, 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 and 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 and doesn't take anything away from the narrative.

The Chameleons Shadow is addictive and gripping as you're always wondering if the protagonist really is a killer or not. There is depth of character as each one has their own problems, backgrounds and personalities which are well conveyed. I'd strongly recommend reading this book to anyone who likes a good thriller.

4 out of 5 stars

A good read but... July 8, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

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 and turns - is rather silly and it seemed as though Minette Walters lost interest in what was going on towards the end and delivered a ''quick finish'' just to tie everything up. Having read all of her books up to date and 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.

5 out of 5 stars

I seem to be in a minority... May 8, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

...Because I have to say I really 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 and their emotional state were very well handled. The anger that Charles feels after being blown up in Iraq strikes me as psychologically extremely close to reality. The isolation and 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.

3 out of 5 stars

A mixed bag April 8, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

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' and 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 and 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 and 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 and 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, and he physically 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 allowances for him, but I found him impossible to like or care about.

Jackson, the female GP and part-time body-builder (I kid you not) is the other main character, and while she is certainly more interesting and appealing than Ackland, she's not very credible. I mean, how many body-building doctors do you know? And how many doctors would call 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 falls foul of: her patronising and 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 usually foul-mouthed bigots with criminal tendancies, and their dialogue is completely unconvincing, being a combination of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and a particularly bad script from The Bill. It makes me laugh in disbelief when reviewers call 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 really 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 all. The simple fact is that despite all 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 and 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.