Reviews: Evening Standard

Disordered Minds is not only the title of Minette Walters's novel, it is also the title of a book by one of her characters, anthropologist Dr Jonathan Hughes. Hughes is interested in the way miscarriages of justice can occur when vulnerable defendants fall into the system.

And he's particularly interested in the case of Howard Stamp, a hare-lipped, self-abusing recluse, convicted of the murder of his grandmother in Bournemouth in June 1970, who died in prison three years later. Encouraged by his literary agent, Andrew Spicer, Hughes joins forces with local councillor George Gardener in a campaign to prove Stamp's innocence. As well as uncovering a host of enseamed beds and unsavoury family relationships, the three also have to come to terms with their own problems in the course of the investigation.

This collage of emails, letters, book excerpts, police statements and plain third-person narrative adds up to a wholly engrossing story: it's undoubtedly one of Walters's best novels yet, with a pleasing hint of sentimentality in the conclusion.

It's startling, too, in the way it forces readers to question conventional assumptions, while overall it could be described as an extended meditation on that famous line of Philip Larkin which epigrammatically sums up the relationship between parents and children.

--T J Binyon

This review first appeared in the Evening Standard on Monday 10 Nov. 2003.