The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters ****

"Amidst the mire of a bloody war, who will notice the emrgence of a sexual psychopath from the ranks of the mercenaries?

When five women are brutally murdered in Sierra Leone, Reuters correspondant Connie Burns questions the arrest of three rebel soldiers for the crimes. No one listens. In the wake of a vicious civil war that saw hundreds of thousands killed and displaced, the rape and murder of women are of little consequence. And who cares if the child soldiers are beaten into confessing?

With little to go on, except her witnessing of a savage attack on a prostitute, C onnie belives a foreigner is responsible- a man who claims to have been in the SAS and who works as a bodyguard to a Lebanese diamond trader, She remembers him from Kinshasa when he was a mercenary for Laurent Kabila's regime, and she suspects he uses the chaos of war to act out sadistic fantasties against women.

Two years later in Iraq, the consequences of her second attempt to expose him are devastating. Terrifiedm degraded and destroyed, she goes into hiding in England, where she strikes up a friendship with jess Derbyshire, a loner whose reclusive nature may well be masking secrets of her own. See parallels betweeen herself and Jess, Connie borrows from the other woman's strength and makes the hazardous decision to attempt a third unmasking of a serial killer, knowing he wil come looking for her."

Very good book.

4 / 5