Customer Reviews
innocent or guilty, that is the question. - By: RD, 01 Jun 2007 
Olive has beenin jail for a few years after confessing to killing & chopping up her mother & sister after a trivial arguement. Roz is an author suffering from depression who has been pushed into writing a book about Olive due to her lack of new material.
Soon Roz is asking tough questions about how accurate Olives confession was & the reason behind the descrepancies. Soon she uncovers more than she bargained for & gets caught upin a plot B story involving an attractive ex-copper too (need I say more?). That was essentially the only annoying thing about the story.
I did enjoy this book non the less as the question of Olives innocence or guilt keeps swinging from one side to the other. It actually managed to keep me hooked as the writing built up the suspence very well.
A worthwhile read - By: J. Turvey, 09 Jan 2007 To me this book was a liitle slow-starting as it took a few chapters to really get me hooked. Once the scene was set, however, I found myself enthralled by the many twists & turns. It stands apart from many of this genre by the way the culprit was not directly obvious-in fact, it kept me guessing until the final few pages which was a rather refreshing feature.
This was the first novel I read of Walters & I liked it so much I have already bought my second. I found it easy to dipin & out of with a simple enough plot that you don't have to keep turning back constantly to check who the charcters are. Altogether, a very good first-read.
The Sculptress - By: Rich Milligan, 02 Oct 2004 Even though I've been a fan of Minnette Walters' books for some time, for some inexplicable reason I had never got round to reading this book, one of her earliest, until recently.
It is classic Walters fare, with many & varied twists & turns, some brilliant false leads, great "flawed" characters (which no-one writes better than her) & some fantastic atmospheric descriptions.
For all this praise however, I didn't rate this amongst her best works. This may be just down to the ultra-high standards she has setin other works, that when she slightly misses the mark, it does stand out. For me, some of the descriptions of the characters didn't run true to their personalities. For example when we first meet the author Rosalind Leigh I got the impression that here was a put upon, almost downtrodden shrinking violet of a person, being forced to write a book she didn't want to after just coming out of a violent & tragic marriage, yet within a few hundred pages she has become a super sleuth supreme & has the courage of a lion to face down the would-be attackers of Hal Hawksley. It is also difficult to get a true handle on Hawksley character, was he a thuggish loose cannon or a charming hero? Even after finishing the book I'm not sure.
This all said it is still a very very good book & is a cut above many of Walters' contemporary writers' efforts. A compelling storyline, some fantastic characters, a "keep the reader guessing to the end" thriller, what more can we ask for?
My favourite Minette - By: C. F. Halliday, 16 Apr 2003 
This is a classic tale of "all is not what it seems" & "never go by first impressions". I read it whilst on holidayin Spain & wasin trouble many times because I just couldn't put it down!
TRUE BEAUTY COMES WRAPPED IN DIFFERENT PACKAGES... - By: Lawyeraau, 11 Nov 2002 This is an intriguing, well written mystery which garnered the 1994 Edgar Award for best novel of the year for British writer, Minette Walters, who has written quite a number of excellent books. She is a writerin the tradition of that other great British novelist, Ruth Rendell, known also as Barbara Vine. The comparison by those who are familiar with the works of both Ms. Walters & Ms. Rendell is inescapable.
This book revolves around two main stories that become by necessity intertwined. One is that of a morbidly obese, young woman, Olive Martin, who is imprisoned for the brutal & grisly murders of her mother, Gwen, & beautiful, younger sister, Amber, whose butchered bodies shocked even the most jaded of folks. On the eve of trial, Olive made a full confession to the crime & received a prison sentence of not less than twenty-five years for her butchery. Knownin prison as "The Sculptress", she passes the time making miniature, carved, wax images, a delicate & sensitive pastime for one with a reputation for such primal savagery.
Enter Rosalind "Roz" Leigh, a thirties something author suffering from writer's block, who accepts a commission to write about the Olive Martin case. After meeting Olive, she becomes intrigued by her, finding her to be other than what she had expected, & a symbiotic relationship develops between the two. As she delves into the facts of the murder case, & as her interviews with Olive reveal, all is not quite what it seems. The more that Roz sorts through the facts & the more people that she interviews who werein some way associated with the Martin family, the more she becomes convinced that a miscarriage of justice has occurred & that the wrong person is paying a horrific price for the grisly murders of Gwen & Amber.
Someone, however, does not wish her to dig too deeply. With the aid of a former police sergeant, Hal Hawksley, an attractive, though conflicted, young man who is now her new love interest & was also the officer who arrested Olive for the murders, Roz stays the course & perserveresin her inquiry. What she discovers is a complex morass of human indifference, greed, & passion that makes for a compelling & well crafted mystery.
