The Dark Room

Jane "Jinx" Kingsley, fashion photographer and daughter of a ruthless millionaire, lies in an expensive private clinic, apparently the luckless survivor of a suicide attempt. When she emerges from her coma, Jinx can remember nothing of recent days: not that her finance, Leo Wallander, has jilted her and run off with her best friend, nor that she made another suicide attempt just a few days earlier. Then the memories begin to surface memories of utter desperation and terror. But Jinx has lost her memory, not her mind. She knows she would never try to kill herself over Leo, and she's just as sure that she was never jilted. With the help of the clinic's director, Dr. Alan Protheroe, Jinx tries to remember what happened that was so horrifying her mind now refuses to recall it. While the police investigate, Jinx faces the worst nightmares of her life the truth about what happened. In this intensely suspenseful novel, nothing is as it first seems, nor even as it subsequently appears. And the answers to the mysteries lie not in the details of forensic evidence, but in the dark, passionate recesses of the mind. From the Hardcover edition.

The broadcast of the brilliant film adaptations of her novels on Showcase has crowned Minette Walters the new queen of British mystery writers. Her career has been little short of astonishing: With her debut novel, The Ice House, she won the British Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Award for the best first crime novel of 1992. Her second mystery, The Sculptress, won the U.S. Edgar Allan Poe Award for the best crime novel published in 1993. In 1994, she achieved a unique triple when The Scold's Bridle was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger for the best crime novel of the year. Her fourth novel, The Dark Room, received further critical acclaim when it appeared in 1995. The Echo, her fifth novel, was said by many reviewers to be her best, most intriguing mystery to date. Her sixth novel, The Breaker, was similarly praised and her seventh, The Shape of Snakes, was published to rave reviews. Minette Walters lives in Dorset, England. www.minettewalters.co.uk