The Sculptress » (~)

One of Britain's most popular crime novelists, Minette Walters has attracted as many fans in the U.S. as she has in the U.K. Ever since her first novel, The Ice House, received the esteemed British John Creasey Award for best first crime novel in 1992, Walters has continued to win awards and accolades for her dark thrillers.

In prison, they call her the Sculptress for the strange figurines she carves— symbols of the day she hacked her mother and sister to pieces and reassembled them in a blood-drenched jigsaw. Sullen, menacing, grotesquely fat, Olive Martin is burned-out journalist Rosalind Leigh's only hope of getting a new book published.

But as she interviews Olive in her cell, Roz finds flaws in the Sculptress's confession. Is she really guilty as she insists? Drawn into Olive's world of obsessive lies and love, nothing can stop Roz's pursuit of the chilling, convoluted truth. Not the tidy suburbanites who would rather forget the murders, not an attack on her life— not even the thought of what might happen if the Sculptress went free...

Gale Research

The Sculptress won Walters the 1994 Edgar Allen Poe Award for best mystery novel, and was adapted and broadcast on public television in England and the United States.