Having now read three or four of Ms. Walter’s books, I can tell you that her style is to have one extremely unpleasant scene near the beginning of the novel. Unfortunately, you are obliged to wade through this nausea-inducing scene before you get to the rest of the story. Which is a pity, as Ms Walters is a very talented writer, with superb story-telling skills that are calculated to keep your eyes firmly on the page.
In the SCULPTRESS, we are the unwilling witnesses to an extremely unpleasant murder of two women—a mother and daughter—whose bodies are found on the kitchen floor of the house they inhabited.
The villain of the piece is supposedly Olive Martin, the sister and daughter to the women. As she has confessed to murdering her relatives, the police spend no time in trying to decide if her confession is true. Instead, they lock her up in prison for at least 25 years.
Six years pass before writer Miss Rosalind Leigh enters the picture. Rosalind (or Roz as she is commonly known) is a troubled thirty-something who is trying to dig herself out of a fog of depression and despair. She has an agent who desperately needs her to work on something. As Rosalind is too apathetic to make any decisions, the agent decides that a book about Olive Martin and the horrific murders of her relatives are in order. Roz really doesn’t want to do this book, but she has no choice. If she doesn’t do it, her publisher is going to drop her.
And so she starts with a visit to Olive Martin in jail. Roz is completely unprepared for Olive. And author Minette Walters spares no detail in describing just how unattractive—no make that monstrous—Olive Martin is. For she is an enormous woman, weighing 26 stone (or 364 pounds), with lank greasy hair, and enormous thighs that have trouble pushing past each other as she walks. However, even though Olive is suspicious and uncooperative, somehow Roz manages to create a bond between them even on that first meeting.
It is no surprise, I suppose, that such a woman would be the butt of unkind laughter, contempt and hatred on the part of the people who meet her. Her male solicitor (or lawyer) hates her and treats her like the psychopath he believes her to be. But Roz sees past Olive’s obvious qualities into the kind woman who lies beneath. And, in the course of her research, discovers—to her great surprise—that no-one has actually talked to Olive about the tragedy that happened at her home.
There is great character development in this novel, and the characters are just wonderful. My favorite (apart from Hal—the love interest in this volume) was Sister Bridget. If you can weather the stomach-churning opening scene, you will find a gem in this wonderful novel.
