"Meticulously worked out and eminently plausible... Fans who gobbled up The Ice House with shivery delight and are now devouring this one, seem amazed at Minette Walters’ finesse in handling innovative plots and bizarre characters."

--Rocky Mountain News

"Minette Walters creates an intensely involving, suspenseful story."

--Wilson Library Bulletin

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...