Minette Walters – författare

This Picador Classic edition of Minette Walters’ The Sculptress features an introduction by Stephanie Merritt, journalist and author of While You Sleep.The facts of the case were simple: Olive Martin murdered her mother and sister and cut them into tiny pieces. She pled guilty to the crime and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Once incarcerated, she spends her days carving miniature human figures out of wax, earning herself the nickname ‘The Sculptress’. But is murder ever that simple? When Rosalind Leigh, an investigative journalist, is persuaded to research Olive’s background, she believes she has uncovered an injustice. If so, she has found the story of a lifetime, a story that may save her faltering career. Yet to write it she must speak with Olive, and she is ill-prepared, both emotionally and psychologically, for the monstrous – but childlike – woman she meets.Awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award when it was first published in 1994, The Sculptress is a pioneering novel, undeniably influencing many of today’s dark, domestic thrillers which dominate the bestseller lists. An unforgettably menacing, gripping and twisting work, Walters will hold you on a knife-edge as Rosalind attempts to untangle the truth about Olive Martin.

Winner of the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Award for best first novel, The Ice House is the mystery thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. It was evident, if there were no other entrance to the ice house, that the body had at some point traversed this thorny barrier . . . The big question was, how long ago? How long had that nightmare been there?The people of Streech village had never trusted the three women living up at the Grange – not since Phoebe Maybury's husband suddenly, inexplicably, vanished.Ten years later a corpse is discovered in the grounds and Phoebe's nightmare begins. For once they have identified the body the police are determined to charge her with murder . . .

Readers love THE PLAYERS'Totally riveting... Perfect.'I was transported every time I picked up this highly imaginative story''Everything I love about historical fiction''This is historical fiction at its best''Good to see female characters having strong roles''I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys history, literature and a "jolly good read"'Who will save them from the gallows?England, 1685. Decades after the end of the civil war, the country is once again divided when a pretender to the throne incites rebellion against King James II. Angered, the king orders every captured rebel to be hanged, drawn and quartered.As the country braces for carnage, the formidable Lady Jayne Harrier and her enigmatic son, assisted by the reclusive daughter of a local magistrate, contrive ways to save men from the gallows.Secrets are kept and surprising friendships formed during the dark days of the Bloody Assizes, in a dangerous gamble to thwart a brutal king's thirst for vengeance...'Fascinating ... told with the masterful skill of a true storyteller' Anne O'Brien'An immersive joy that will stand the test of time' Elizabeth Chadwick

The terrifying Hammer novella by Minette Walters, bestselling author of The Sculptress and The Scold's BridleMuna's bedroom is a dark windowless cellar and her activities are confined to cooking and cleaning. She’s grown used to being maltreated by the Songoli family; to being a slave.She’s never been outside, doesn’t know how to read or write, and cannot speak English.At least that’s what the Songolis believe. But Muna is far cleverer - and her plans more terrifying - than the Songolis, or anyone else, can ever imagine ...

A compelling look into damaged minds, The Chameleon's Shadow is a psychological thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. When Lieutenant Charles Acland is flown home from Iraq with serious head injuries, he faces not only permanent disfigurement but also an apparent change to his previously outgoing personality.Crippled by migraines, and suspicious of his psychiatrist, he begins to display sporadic bouts of aggression, particularly against women, especially his ex-fiancee who seems unable to accept that the relationship is over.After his injuries prevent his return to the army, he cuts all ties with his former life and moves to London. Alone and unmonitored, he sinks into a private world of guilt and paranoid distrust . . . until a customer annoys him in a Bermondsey pub and he attracts the attention of local police investigating three murders which appear to have been motivated by extreme rage . . .Under suspicion, Acland is forced to confront the real issues behind his isolation. How much control does he have over the dark side of his personality? Do his migraines contribute to his rages? Has he always been the duplicitous chameleon that his ex-fiancee claims?And why – if he hates women – does he look to a woman for help?

A compelling look into damaged minds, The Chameleon's Shadow is a psychological thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. When Lieutenant Charles Acland is flown home from Iraq with serious head injuries, he faces not only permanent disfigurement but also an apparent change to his previously outgoing personality.Crippled by migraines, and suspicious of his psychiatrist, he begins to display sporadic bouts of aggression, particularly against women, especially his ex-fiancee who seems unable to accept that the relationship is over.After his injuries prevent his return to the army, he cuts all ties with his former life and moves to London. Alone and unmonitored, he sinks into a private world of guilt and paranoid distrust . . . until a customer annoys him in a Bermondsey pub and he attracts the attention of local police investigating three murders which appear to have been motivated by extreme rage . . .Under suspicion, Acland is forced to confront the real issues behind his isolation. How much control does he have over the dark side of his personality? Do his migraines contribute to his rages? Has he always been the duplicitous chameleon that his ex-fiancee claims?And why – if he hates women – does he look to a woman for help?

Acid Row. The name the beleaguered inhabitants give to their 'sink' estate.A no-man's land of single mothers and fatherless children – where angry, alienated youth controls the streets. Into this battleground comes Sophie Morrison, a young doctor visiting a patient in Acid Row. Little does she know that she is entering the home of a known paedophile . . . and with reports circulating that a tormented child called Amy has disappeared, the vigilantes are out in force. Soon Sophie is trapped at the centre of a terrifying siege, with a man she has come to despise. Whipped to a frenzy by unsubstantiated rumour, the mob unleashes its hatred.Against authority . . . the law . . . and the 'pervert'. 'Protecting Amy' becomes the catch-all defence for the terrible events that follow. And if murder is part of it, then so be it.But is Amy really missing? Filled with suspense and shattering revelations, Acid Row is a taut psychological thriller from crime queen Minette Walters.

Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Fiction, Fox Evil is the bestselling thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. When elderly Ailsa Lockyer-Fox is found dead in her garden, dressed only in night clothes and with blood stains on the ground near her body, the finger of suspicion points at her wealthy, landowning husband, Colonel James Lockyer-Fox. A coroner's inquest gives a verdict of 'natural causes' but the gossip surrounding him refuses to go away.Why? Because he's guilty? Or because resentful women in the isolated Dorset village where he lives rule the roost? Shenstead is a place of too few people and too many secrets. Why have James and Ailsa cut their children out of their wills? What happened in the past to create such animosity within the family? And why is James so desperate to find his illegitimate grandchild?Friendless and alone, his reclusive behaviour begins to alarm his London-based solicitor, Mark Ankerton, whose concern deepens when he discovers that James has become the victim of a relentless campaign which accuses him of far worse than the death of his wife. Allegations which he refuses to challenge . . . Why? Because they're a motive for murder? . . .

Buried secrets and gritty bravery, The Devil's Feather is the psychological thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. Have you ever wanted to bury a secret so deeply that no one will find out about it? With private security firms supplying bodyguards in every theatre of war, who will notice the emergence of a sexual psychopath from the ranks of the mercenaries?Reuters correspondent Connie Burns is no stranger to the world’s troublespots, including the vicious civil unrest in Sierra Leone and the war in Iraq. But as she begins to suspect that a foreigner is using the chaos of war to act out sadistic fantasies against women, her efforts to bring him to justice leave her devastated.Degraded and terrified, she goes into hiding in England and strikes up a friendship with Jess Derbyshire, a loner whose reclusive nature may well be masking secrets of her own. Connie draws from the other woman’s strength and makes the hazardous decision to attempt a third unmasking of a serial killer . . .Knowing he will come looking for her . . .

Shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award, The Dark Room is the psychological thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. Something else had happened . . . Something so terrible that she was too frightened to search her memory for it . . .The newspapers reported the case with relish. Jane (Jinx) Kingsley, fashion photographer and heiress, tries to kill herself after being unceremoniously jilted by her fiancé, who has since disappeared – together with Jinx's best friend Meg Harris . . .But when Jinx wakes from her coma, she can remember nothing about her alleged suicide attempt. With the help of Dr Alan Protheroe of the Nightingale Clinic, she slowly begins to piece together the fragments of the last few weeks. Then the memories begin to surface . . . memories of utter desperation and absolute terror.

A thirty year old murder case and a possible wrongful conviction, Disordered Minds is the mystery thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. In 1970, Harold Stamp, a retarded twenty-year-old was convicted on disputed evidence and a retracted confession of brutally murdering his grandmother – the one person who understood and protected him. Less than three years later he is dead, driven to suicide by isolation and despair. A fate befitting a murderer, perhaps, but what if he were innocent?Thirty years on, Jonathan Hughes, an anthropologist specializing in social stereotyping, comes across the case by accident. He finds alarming disparities in the evidence and has little doubt that Stamp's conviction was a terrible miscarriage of justice. But how far is Hughes prepared to go in the search for justice? Is the forgotten story of one friendless young man compelling enough to make him leave his books and face his own demons?And with what result? If Stamp didn't murder Grace Jeffries then somebody else did . . . and sleeping dogs are best left alone . . .

Set in the bleak environments of London’s homeless community, The Echo is the mystery thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. It was the smell that Mrs Powell noticed first. Slightly sweet. Slightly unpleasant . . . It shocked her badly to find a dead man in the corner, his head slumped on his knees.Who was Billy Blake, other than a homeless alcoholic who wandered the streets?Why was he found dead from starvation in one of the richest areas of one of the richest capitals in the world?And why did he die alone in the garage of wealthy architect Amanda Powell – a woman whose wealth can only be explained if her husband is dead . . .?

Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year, The Scold's Bridle is the mystery thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. I wonder if I should keep these diaries under lock and key. Jenny Spede has disturbed them again . . . What does she make, I wonder, of an old woman, deformed by arthritis, stripping naked for a young man? The pills worry me more. Ten is such a round number to be missing . . . Mathilda Gillespie's body was found nearly two days after she had taken an overdose and slashed her wrists with a Stanley knife. But what shocked Dr Sarah Blakeney the most was the scold's bridle obscuring the dead woman’s face, a metal contraption grotesquely adorned with a garland of nettles and Michaelmas daisies. What happened at Cedar House in the tortured hours before Mathilda's death?The police assume that the coroner will return a verdict of suicide. Only Dr Blakeney, it seems, doubts the verdict. Until it is discovered that Mathilda’s diaries have disappeared . . .

Winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best crime novel, The Sculptress is the mystery thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. It was a slaughterhouse, the most horrific scene I have ever witnessed . . . Olive Martin is a dangerous woman. I advise you to be extremely wary in your dealings with her.The facts of the case were simple: Olive Martin had pleaded guilty to killing and dismembering her sister and mother, earning herself the chilling nickname ‘The Sculptress’.This much journalist Rosalind Leigh knew before her first meeting with Olive, currently serving a life sentence. How could Roz have foreseen that the encounter was destined to change her life – for ever?

A brutal crime with three suspects, The Breaker is the mystery thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. When she revisited, always with astonishment, what had happened to her, it was the deliberate breaking of her fingers that remained indelibly printed on her memory . . .Twelve hours after a woman’s broken body is washed up on a deserted shore, her traumatized three-year-old daughter is discovered twenty miles away wandering the streets of Poole.But why was Kate killed and her daughter, a witness, allowed to live? And why weren’t they together? More curiously, why had Kate willingly boarded a boat when she had a terror of drowning at sea?Police suspicion centres on both a young actor, whose sailing boat is moored just yards from where the toddler is found, and the murdered woman’s husband. Was he really in Liverpool the night she died? And why does their daughter scream in terror every time he tries to pick her up?

Exposing the horrifying consequences when communities ignore the people who need them the most, The Shape of Snakes is the psychological mystery from crime queen Minette Walters.November 1978. Britain is on strike. The dead lie unburied, rubbish piles in the streets – and somewhere in West London a black woman dies in a rain-soaked gutter.Her passing would have gone unmourned but for the young woman who finds her and who believes - apparently against reason – that Annie was murdered. But whatever the truth about Annie – whether she was as mad as her neighbours claimed, whether she lived in squalor as the police said – something passed between her and Mrs Ranelagh in the moment of death which binds this one woman to her cause for the next twenty years.But why is Mrs Ranelagh so convinced it was murder when by her own account Annie died without speaking? And why would any woman spend twenty painstaking years uncovering the truth – unless her reasons are personal . . . ?

Winner of the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Award for best first novel, The Ice House is the mystery thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. It was evident, if there were no other entrance to the ice house, that the body had at some point traversed this thorny barrier . . . The big question was, how long ago? How long had that nightmare been there?The people of Streech village had never trusted the three women living up at the Grange – not since Phoebe Maybury's husband suddenly, inexplicably, vanished.Ten years later a corpse is discovered in the grounds and Phoebe's nightmare begins. For once they have identified the body the police are determined to charge her with murder . . .

Winner of the Edgar Allen Poe Award for best crime novel, The Sculptress is the mystery thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. It was a slaughterhouse, the most horrific scene I have ever witnessed . . . Olive Martin is a dangerous woman. I advise you to be extremely wary in your dealings with her.The facts of the case were simple: Olive Martin had pleaded guilty to killing and dismembering her sister and mother, earning herself the chilling nickname ‘The Sculptress’.This much journalist Rosalind Leigh knew before her first meeting with Olive, currently serving a life sentence. How could Roz have foreseen that the encounter was destined to change her life – for ever?

Shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award, The Dark Room is the psychological thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. Something else had happened . . . Something so terrible that she was too frightened to search her memory for it . . .The newspapers reported the case with relish. Jane (Jinx) Kingsley, fashion photographer and heiress, tries to kill herself after being unceremoniously jilted by her fiancé, who has since disappeared – together with Jinx's best friend Meg Harris . . .But when Jinx wakes from her coma, she can remember nothing about her alleged suicide attempt. With the help of Dr Alan Protheroe of the Nightingale Clinic, she slowly begins to piece together the fragments of the last few weeks. Then the memories begin to surface . . . memories of utter desperation and absolute terror.

Set in the bleak environments of London’s homeless community, The Echo is the mystery thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. It was the smell that Mrs Powell noticed first. Slightly sweet. Slightly unpleasant . . . It shocked her badly to find a dead man in the corner, his head slumped on his knees.Who was Billy Blake, other than a homeless alcoholic who wandered the streets?Why was he found dead from starvation in one of the richest areas of one of the richest capitals in the world?And why did he die alone in the garage of wealthy architect Amanda Powell – a woman whose wealth can only be explained if her husband is dead . . .?

Acid Row. The name the beleaguered inhabitants give to their 'sink' estate.A no-man's land of single mothers and fatherless children – where angry, alienated youth controls the streets. Into this battleground comes Sophie Morrison, a young doctor visiting a patient in Acid Row. Little does she know that she is entering the home of a known paedophile . . . and with reports circulating that a tormented child called Amy has disappeared, the vigilantes are out in force. Soon Sophie is trapped at the centre of a terrifying siege, with a man she has come to despise. Whipped to a frenzy by unsubstantiated rumour, the mob unleashes its hatred.Against authority . . . the law . . . and the 'pervert'. 'Protecting Amy' becomes the catch-all defence for the terrible events that follow. And if murder is part of it, then so be it.But is Amy really missing? Filled with suspense and shattering revelations, Acid Row is a taut psychological thriller from crime queen Minette Walters.

Exposing the horrifying consequences when communities ignore the people who need them the most, The Shape of Snakes is the psychological mystery from crime queen Minette Walters.November 1978. Britain is on strike. The dead lie unburied, rubbish piles in the streets – and somewhere in West London a black woman dies in a rain-soaked gutter.Her passing would have gone unmourned but for the young woman who finds her and who believes - apparently against reason – that Annie was murdered. But whatever the truth about Annie – whether she was as mad as her neighbours claimed, whether she lived in squalor as the police said – something passed between her and Mrs Ranelagh in the moment of death which binds this one woman to her cause for the next twenty years.But why is Mrs Ranelagh so convinced it was murder when by her own account Annie died without speaking? And why would any woman spend twenty painstaking years uncovering the truth – unless her reasons are personal . . . ?

Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Fiction, Fox Evil is the bestselling thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. When elderly Ailsa Lockyer-Fox is found dead in her garden, dressed only in night clothes and with blood stains on the ground near her body, the finger of suspicion points at her wealthy, landowning husband, Colonel James Lockyer-Fox. A coroner's inquest gives a verdict of 'natural causes' but the gossip surrounding him refuses to go away.Why? Because he's guilty? Or because resentful women in the isolated Dorset village where he lives rule the roost? Shenstead is a place of too few people and too many secrets. Why have James and Ailsa cut their children out of their wills? What happened in the past to create such animosity within the family? And why is James so desperate to find his illegitimate grandchild?Friendless and alone, his reclusive behaviour begins to alarm his London-based solicitor, Mark Ankerton, whose concern deepens when he discovers that James has become the victim of a relentless campaign which accuses him of far worse than the death of his wife. Allegations which he refuses to challenge . . . Why? Because they're a motive for murder? . . .

A thirty year old murder case and a possible wrongful conviction, Disordered Minds is the mystery thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. In 1970, Harold Stamp, a retarded twenty-year-old was convicted on disputed evidence and a retracted confession of brutally murdering his grandmother – the one person who understood and protected him. Less than three years later he is dead, driven to suicide by isolation and despair. A fate befitting a murderer, perhaps, but what if he were innocent?Thirty years on, Jonathan Hughes, an anthropologist specializing in social stereotyping, comes across the case by accident. He finds alarming disparities in the evidence and has little doubt that Stamp's conviction was a terrible miscarriage of justice. But how far is Hughes prepared to go in the search for justice? Is the forgotten story of one friendless young man compelling enough to make him leave his books and face his own demons?And with what result? If Stamp didn't murder Grace Jeffries then somebody else did . . . and sleeping dogs are best left alone . . .

Buried secrets and gritty bravery, The Devil's Feather is the psychological thriller from crime queen Minette Walters. Have you ever wanted to bury a secret so deeply that no one will find out about it? With private security firms supplying bodyguards in every theatre of war, who will notice the emergence of a sexual psychopath from the ranks of the mercenaries?Reuters correspondent Connie Burns is no stranger to the world’s troublespots, including the vicious civil unrest in Sierra Leone and the war in Iraq. But as she begins to suspect that a foreigner is using the chaos of war to act out sadistic fantasies against women, her efforts to bring him to justice leave her devastated.Degraded and terrified, she goes into hiding in England and strikes up a friendship with Jess Derbyshire, a loner whose reclusive nature may well be masking secrets of her own. Connie draws from the other woman’s strength and makes the hazardous decision to attempt a third unmasking of a serial killer . . .Knowing he will come looking for her . . .