Minette Walters The Chameleon's Shadow

Minette Walters The Chameleon's Shadow:

Lieutenant Charles Acland has returned from Iraq with severe head and face injuries and a predilection for sudden rages particularly against women. Three men are killed in London and Acland seems implicated. Walter's compelling exploration of estrangement and psychological chaos owes much to the presence of one of her best characters ever, Jackson, the weight lifting locum G.P. who moonlights as a bouncer at her girlfriend's pub and befriends Acland when he precipates an unnecessary brawl. A monumental 'saviour' of near mythic competence, Jackson ironically begins to question Acland's social isolation and sexual anxiety. Salvation can arrive in many forms!

Add to this an ex-girl friend who believes she is Uma Thurman, a secretive tramp, deceitful rent boy and a strangely submissive parent; this is a book that entertains without insult or injury!

The Chameleon's Shadow

Minette Walters

Knopf, Jan 2008, $24.95

ISBN: 9780307264633

On 24 Nov 2006 the convoy drives the highway that links Basra and Baghdad led by a Scimitar Reconnaissance Vehicle when roadside bombs explode. The destruction of the RV became a top DVD seller in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. However, the commander of the RV, British Army Lieutenant Charles Acland survived the blasts with facial and brain injuries; everyone else inside died. Two days later the Light Dragoon Guards' officer is flown unconscious to Birmingham, England to begin reconstructive surgery of his disfigured face.

Back home, Charles is filled with rage especially towards women, and rejects the facial surgery, but initially accepts the psychological treatment offered by Dr. Robert Willis. Charles is incredibly angry at his former fiancee Jen Morley who insists even before his war trauma he was a chameleon. To her he was a woman's man; to his unit and his male friends he was a man's man; to his mom he was the adoring son. Charles abruptly moves to London at about the same time a serial killer is murdering people. He remains reclusive and angry yet accepting. His rage at Muslims leads to a brawl in a bar with Pakistani-English and a rescue by a three hundred pound female lesbian weight lifter Dr. Jackson and the bar's owner Daisy, who try to help him afterward.

This is an interesting look at Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in which the medical profession is unsure of whether Charles' injuries changed his personality especially since Jen convinces them he hid his killer instincts behind a nice guy chameleon. Charles seems genuine and his two female saviors also, but it is the plot focused on whether he is a serial killer or not that grips readers. Although a late spin that answers the question of is he seems off kilter, fans of Minette Walters will enjoy this psychological thriller.

Harriet Klausner