Disordered Minds Walters, Minette

A schizophrenic tramp was convicted of murdering his neighbor in 1970s Britain. Open and shut. Except journalist Jonathan Hughes thinks the wrong person went down for it — and he's got the forensics to prove it. When he pulls novelist George Gardener into the cold case, they unravel a neighborhood thick with secrets, class resentment, and silences that have calcified over decades. Walters writes psychological crime with surgical precision, peeling back the veneer of respectability to expose the rot underneath. This isn't a whodunit — it's a study in how communities protect their own and sacrifice the vulnerable. The past refuses to stay buried, and neither do the bodies. For fans of Val McDermid and Ruth Rendell who like their mysteries dark, morally complex, and forensically detailed.