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    The Breaker
    The Breaker
    The Breaker
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Breaker

    Written by Minette Walters

    Narrated by Simon Prebble

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    With six critically-acclaimed novels to her credit, this Edgar Award-winning author is so widely popular that her work has been adapted for television and translated into 32 languages. An international best-seller, The Breaker is a masterpiece of psychological suspense. Twelve hours after Kate Sumner's brutally murdered body washes up on the beach, her traumatized three-year-old daughter is found wandering the streets alone. At first, the prime suspect is a young actor, obsessed with pornography. But now the local English constable has doubts about the victim's husband. Was he really out of town when she was killed? And why does the child scream every time her father comes near her? Holding readers in an exhilarating state of anticipation, British author Minette Walters guides them through a startling maze where nothing is as it seems, and even the innocent tell lies. From beginning to end, the only certainty on which listeners can rely is the superb delivery of veteran narrator Simon Prebble.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 13, 2011
    ISBN9781461812777
    The Breaker
    Author

    Minette Walters

    Minette Walters is England’s bestselling female crime writer. She has written many novels, including The Ice House and The Scold's Bridle, and has won the CWA John Creasey Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award and two CWA Gold Daggers for Fiction. Minette Walters lives in Dorset with her husband and two children.

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    Reviews for The Breaker

    3.5/5

    265 ratings9 reviews

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    • 2/5
      READ IN DUTCH

      I bought this book because it was very cheap and I had never read anything from Minette Walters before. I'm always looking for new (for me new) good writers.

      Two boys find the body of a young woman on a beach. Her tree-year-old child is found in a nearby village. The police start to investigate the woman's death.

      I actually was disappointed. It wasn't what I expected it to be. I thought that the story was almost boring and I was actually just waiting on a better part, but I couldn't find it. I need to say that her writing style was OK, but I didn't like the story. It didn't make me want to read more of her books.
    • 5/5
      The only thing I can add to the numerous reviews is that on the last couple of pages the proof reading seems to of gone to pot as I noticed some spelling mistakes. My first 'Minette".,,,apart from the brutal crime quite a gentle read.
    • 4/5
      At the heart of this story is a complex riddle--who killed the naked young woman found washed up on the south shore of England? On the case is Nick Ingram, local constable, and John Galbraith, inspector. Their lives as well as the lives of the suspects in the case are delved into and the reader (or listener) is kept guessing as to how the complex relational tableau is going to play out. Since the suspense relies more on the interplay of the characters and the underlying secrets of them it can take a while to really get interested in it, but once you do the story really engages your brain. Give it a read if you like psychological puzzlers.
    • 2/5
      I read this mainly because I know the town where it is set very well. Unfortunately this was the only enjoyable thing about it for me. A really weak mystery that left me wondering what the point was.
    • 4/5
      I love Minette Walters books, and have come to expect great characterization with at least one very creepy character in the story. This book doesn't really have a creepy character, and I found it hard to try to care who raped and killed Kate Sumner. I didn't find that there was much tension in the plot, and I knew right from the beginning who did it. I liked Constable Ingram and that is why I gave the book 4 stars. Oh well, I look forward to the next one because not for nothing has Ms. Walters won so many awards.
    • 3/5
      Spoilers at the end.I’ve read that Minette Walters was a good writer and now that I’ve read one, I have to concur. She reminds me in a way of PD James. That impression is probably due to the fact that this first book is set in a coastal English town, which is similar to more than one PD James novel I’ve read. Some of why I think that is how the facts are revealed – slowly and one at a time but in such a way that I stayed interested throughout. One major difference between Walters and James is that Walters has multiple cops solving the crime and James only has Dalgliesh. At first, I did think that Steve the actor did it. The evidence was pretty compelling although circumstantial. Then when the focus turned to the husband William, a pretty good case was made out that he did it, too. Finally in the end Steve’s friend Tony comes under the microscope and I start thinking that he was the one. Especially when he seems outraged about Steve’s posing for pictures with underage girls and wanted Kate’s attention for himself. It seemed plausible that Tony would have killed Kate and framed Steve for it for revenge and some kind of twisted social justice.In the end, Steve turns out to be guilty. It was a more subtle guilt though given the fact that he was sociopathic without extreme violence.
    • 4/5
      I picked this up after reading Walters' The Ice House and found it formulaic. I like the formula, so that's okay. In this story, a dead woman's body is found by two boys who then encounter a young man who may or may not be implicated in the woman's death. The woman's husband is a strong suspect based on his bizarre behavior toward their troubled 3 year old daughter. The original investigator, a coastal constable, sees what others don't and gradually builds trust and romance with a troubled local woman involved at the edges of the investigation.
    • 1/5
      I'd read Disordered Minds, another of Minette Walter's books, ages ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, so when I spied this one in a box of 50p paperbacks at a car boot sale, I grabbed it. Sadly, it was a big disappointment.It's a typical murder mystery in which the nude body of a young woman washes up on the Dorset coast. The two suspects are identified very near the beginning of the story - the woman's husband and a young actor with whom she was having an affair. The rest of the book seems designed to just alternate back and forth between the two suspects much like a very dull tennis match. In addition, the style was an attempt to be overtly journalistic, but I didn't think that experiment was a success. I think Walters was aiming for a real psychological thriller, but it fell short of the mark.
    • 4/5
      Very well-written, but equally disturbing.