The Sculptress
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Walters, whose first mystery, The Ice House , was well received on this side of the Atlantic, attempts a combination of psychological thriller and mystery here that doesn't quite come off. Roz Leigh, an author embittered by the tragic death of a child and a split from her husband, agrees to write the story of Olive Martin, a grossly fat, untidy woman serving a long prison sentence for the particularly grisly murder of her mother and sister. Visiting Olive in jail, Roz finds herself drawn to the woman, and despite the fact that ``the sculptress'' readily confessed to the crime, she begins to find odd discrepancies in the evidence against her. Roz becomes involved with the former policeman who arrested Olive (and who had his own doubts), and together they unravel the complicated morass of sex and madness that led to the butchery. While there are many intriguing plot turns, Olive's odd personality never quite convinces and subplots about the ex-policeman's restaurant and Olive's crooked lawyer are largely extraneous. For most of the way, despite these caveats and the novel's continuing strain on credulity, this is still a gripping read.
