Minette Walters has made a name for herself writing psychological crime mysteries, and several of her books have won high praise.  The Dark Room is another book in the same vein, but it is disappointing.  London photographer Jinx Kingsley wakes up in an expensive private psychiatric clinic.  Her millionaire father is paying the bill, but he never visits her.  She has amnesia resulting from her car being driven into a wall, and she was the driver.  So the authorities are calling the incident a suicide attempt.  This would make sense because her fiancé Leo had announced previously that he was not going to marry her and would instead be marrying her best friend Meg.  But Jinx can't believe she would have tried to kill herself, and she feels very glad that she is not marrying Leo, so she can't believe that she was suicidal because of the end of her marriage plans.  So the first mystery is what was the cause of the car wreck.  Then Meg and Leo's bodies are discovered; they had been bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer, and the novel becomes a whodunit.  The mystery deepens when it turns out that ten years previously, Jinx's first husband was killed in a similar way.  Jinx is the police's main suspect, but we know from the start that she didn't commit the crimes.  So readers have to consider all the other candidates.  There is her father with a criminal background who would have no reservations in hiring someone to do violence for him.  There are also her two good-for-nothing half-brothers who are deeply resentful of Jinx.  And then there are many more minor characters who might have some agenda of violence. 

Unfortunately, Walters does not keep up enough suspense for the reader to care much who the culprit is.  The central problem for the plot is that Jinx spends the whole novel lying around in a bed having visitors, and doesn't do anything apart from talk and wait to get her memory back.  The characterization of most people in the book is also rather flat, so while there are many details and intricacies, the reader does not get to really understand the characters well.  Furthermore, Jinx's psychiatrist, Alan Protheroe, has a laisser-faire attitude towards his patient's treatment and seems to do very little for his other patients.  It is not very credible that any psychiatric facility would actually operate in the way that Protheroe's clinic does.  While the book was first published in 1995, it feels like it could have been written in the 1930s.  Some readers do enjoy Walters' writing and have praised this book, so it would be wrong to completely write off The Dark Room as a failure, but it certainly does not provide any great psychological insight into crime or family problems.

© 2007 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York.

Categories: Fiction