Best 1993 Adventures (9)

By: Joshua Glenn
July 11, 2020

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1993 adventure novels.

Minette Walters’s crime adventure The Sculptress.

Under pressure from her publisher to produce a new book, Roz Leigh, a burned-out nonfiction author mourning the death of her daughter and dissolution of her marriage, interviews Olive Martin, a menacing women who (six years previously) was imprisoned for life after she was discovered cradling her mother’s and younger sister’s dismembered body parts. It seems she pleaded guilty to murdering them… but the examining psychiatrists agree she’s not a psychopath. Why did she do it? Moreover, why did she arrange her victims’ limbs into abstract shapes? And what’s the significance of the bizarre figurines she fashions, now that she’s in prison, for which seemingly creepy behavior she’s been dubbed “the Sculptress”? In the course of their interviews, Roz finds flaws in the prosecution’s evidence… and begins to suspect that Olive is concealing her own innocence. Was she railroaded — because she happens to be morbidly obese? Or did she actually commit the crime? Teaming up with Hal Hawksley, the volatile ex-police detective — now an unsuccessful restaurateur — who investigated the case, and to whom she finds herself erotically attracted, Roz is drawn into Olive’s world of obsessional lies, love, betrayal, and greed. There are thrills and chills, and romance. The author is adept at keeping us guessing — revealing new details whenever we think we’ve got the mystery figured out. Which is something, Roz is led to understand, that she may never do to her own satisfaction.

Fun facts: Inspired by an encounter Walters had as a volunteer prison visitor, her second novel won an Edgar Award. It was adapted in 1996 as a BBC-TV series, starring Pauline Quirke as Olive, Caroline Goodall as Roz, and Christopher Fulford as Hal.

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Best 1993 Adventures (9)

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