Minette Walters Books In Order

Black Death Books In Publication Order

  1. The Last Hours (2017)
  2. The Turn of Midnight (2018)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Ice House (1992)
  2. The Sculptress (1993)
  3. The Scold’s Bridle (1994)
  4. The Dark Room (1995)
  5. The Echo (1997)
  6. The Breaker (1998)
  7. The Shape of Snakes (2000)
  8. Acid Row (2001)
  9. Fox Evil (2002)
  10. Disordered Minds (2003)
  11. The Devil’s Feather (2005)
  12. The Chameleon’s Shadow (2007)
  13. The Cellar (2015)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. The Tinder Box (1999)
  2. Chickenfeed (2006)
  3. A Dreadful Murder (2013)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction (2002)
  2. Imagined Lives (2010)

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Minette Walters Books Overview

The Ice House

With this stunning debut a marvelous marriage of classic convention and contemporary sophistication Minette Walters sets a new standard of excellence for the mystery novel. The three women living in seclusion at an elegant Hampshire country house have long been fodder for village gossip…
even whispers of a witches’ coven. So when a faceless corpse of uncertain vintage is found in the Streech Grange ice house, Chief Inspector Walsh can’t wait to make a case of it. Lady of the manor Phoebe Maybury, still haunted by Walsh’s relentless investigation of her husband’s strange disappearance ten years ago, is calm. She and her two housemates sensitive, charming artist Diana Goode and pretty, earthy Anne Cattrell seem as puzzled as the police. But do they have something to hide?While Walsh strives to nail Phoebe for murder, sexy young Detective Sergeant McLoughlin turns his attention to the exasperating and magnetic Anne. Soon his inquiry and his impulses will draw him into a tangled thicket of love, loyalty, and deadly intrigue.

The Sculptress

Everyone knows Olive Martin, the huge and menacing woman who was found five years ago with the carved up bodies of her mother and younger sister. Everyone knows how she pleaded guilty to murder at her trial. And everyone knows not to anger The Sculptress even now that she is safely locked in prison for a minimum of twenty five years. When Rosalind Leigh accepts a commission to write a book about Olive, she finds herself wondering what lies behind all of these facts that everyone knows. When Roz first visits her in prison, she finds that Olive is not quite what she expected. And if as Roz is repeatedly warned Olive lies about almost everything, then why did she confess so readily to two hideous murders? The deeper she is drawn into the shadowy world of The Sculptress, the more firmly she is convinced that Olive is hiding something perhaps even her innocence. But whom could Olive be protecting and why?

The Scold’s Bridle

I wonder if I should keep these diaries under lock and key. Jenny Spede has disturbed them again…
What does she make, I wonder, of an old woman, deformed by arthritis, stripping naked for a young man? The pills worry me more. Ten is such a round number to be missing…
Mathilda Gillespie’s body was found nearly two days after she had taken an overdose and slashed her wrists with a Stanley knife. But what shocked Dr Sarah Blakeney the most was The Scold’s Bridle obscuring the dead woman’s face, a metal contraption grotesquely adorned with a garland of nettles and Michaelmas daisies. What happened at Cedar House in the tortured hours before Mathilda’s death? The police assume that the coroner will return a verdict of suicide. Only Dr Blakeney, it seems, doubts the verdict. Until it is discovered that Mathilda’s diaries have disappeared…
‘An atmosphere of tantalizing, overpowering menace…
The tradition of the English whodunnit has passed into the safe hands and dangerous imagination of Minette Walters’ ‘The Times’.

The Dark Room

The newspaper reported the case with relish. Jane Jinx Kingsley, fashion photographer and heiress, tried to kill herself after being unceremoniously jilted by her fiance, Leo Wallader. Leo has disappeared together with Jinx’s best friend Meg Harris. But when she wakes from her coma, Jinx can remember nothing about her alleged suicide attempt. Nevertheless, Jinx is convinced that she would never try to kill herself over Leo…
Surely it was she who wanted to break the engagement. When the help of Dr. Alan Protheroe of the Nightingale Clinic, Jinx slowly begins to unlock her nightmares and piece together the fragments of the last few weeks. The truth about what happened to her lies deep within her mind. But what other terrifying memories is she about to disturb?

The Echo

It was the smell that Mrs. Powell noticed first. Slightly sweet. Slightly unpleasant It shocked her badly to find a dead man in the corner, his head slumped on his knees. When Billy Blake, a homeless alcoholic, is found dead of starvation in Amanda Powell’s private garage in the ritzy docklands area of London, the press arrives in force. But Billy s story is never told because Amanda refuses to comment, and interest in the unknown wino quickly flags. Then, six months after Blake s death, the journalist Michael Deacon discovers that Amanda has changed her tune. Now she is suddenly eager to talk about Billy for Deacon s feature article on poverty and the homeless. More than eager she seems obsessed with finding out the real identity of her dead visitor. Deacon s curiosity is piqued. Why is Amanda taking Blake s death so personally? Why did he choose her garage to die in? And why is she so anxious to discover his true identity?The more he learns about Blake, the more Deacon can sense echoes of the homeless man s life in his own. Echoes so compelling that Deacon can t let go of the story until he s learned who Billy Blake really was and why Amanda is almost certainly lying about her own interest in the dead man. From the Hardcover edition.

The Breaker

Why was Mary killed, and her daughter, a witness, allowed to live? Why weren’t they together, and why had Mary willingly boarded a boat when she had a terror of drowning at sea? Police suspicion centres both on a young actor, and the murdered woman’s husband.

The Shape of Snakes

The Edgar Award winning, bestselling author hailed by The Washington Post Book World as ‘a master of the macabre who imbues her novels with an intensely eerie atmosphere’ weaves an astonishing tale of mystery, intrigue, and revenge. In just seven years, Minette Walters has burst from the ranks of mystery writers to become a bestselling author the world over and today’s preeminent practitioner of psychological suspense. With constant comparisons to P. D. James and Ruth Rendell and a growing American audience, Walters is poised for breakout success with The Shape of Snakes, her finest, and most finely wrought, novel yet. November 1978. The winter of discontent. Britain is on strike. The dead lie unburied, garbage piles in the streets and somewhere in West London a black woman dies in a rain filled gutter. Known as ‘Mad Annie,’ she was despised by her neighbors. Her passing would have gone unmourned and unnoticed but for the young woman who finds her and who believes apparently against reason that Annie was murdered. But whatever the truth about Annie whether she was as mad as her neighbors claimed, whether she lived in squalor as the police said, whether she cruelly mistreated the cats found starving in her house something passed between her and Mrs. Ranelagh in the moment of death that binds this one woman to her cause for the next twenty years. But why is Mrs. Ranelagh so convinced it was murder, when, by her own account, Annie died without speaking? Why does the subject make her husband so angry that he refuses to talk about what happened that night? And why would any woman spend twenty painstaking years uncovering the truth unless her reasons are personal?

Acid Row

A writer of unquestioned talent and power, Minette Walters has electrified readers around the globe with her fiercely compelling and utterly riveting thrillers that have earned her comparisons to Ruth Rendell and P. D. James. In Acid Row, she takes us to a place that is all the more frightening because it is so real. Acid Row. The name beleaguered inhabitants give their crime riddled, decaying housing project. It’s a no man’s land of single mothers and fatherless children, where angry, alienated youths control the streets. Into this battleground comes Sophie Morrison, a young doctor visiting a patient there and unaware that she is entering the home of a known pedophile. With reports circulating that a child has disappeared into this bedlam, the vigilantes are out in force. Sophie is trapped at the center of this terrifying siege, wth a man who can and will harm her…
and the mob is out for blood.

Fox Evil

When elderly Ailsa Lockyer Fox is found dead in her garden, dressed only in night clothes and with blood stains on the ground near her body, the finger of suspicion points at her wealthy, landowning husband, Colonel James Lockyer Fox. A coroner’s inquest gives a verdict of ‘natural causes’ but the gossip surrounding him refuses to go away. Why? Because he’s guilty? Or because resentful women in the isolated Dorset village where he lives rule the roost? Shenstead is a place of too few people and too many secrets. Why have James and Ailsa cut their children out of their wills? What happened in the past to create such animosity within the family? And why is James so desperate to find his illegitimate grandchild? Friendless and alone, his reclusive behaviour begins to alarm his London based solicitor, Mark Ankerton, whose concern deepens when he discovers that James has become the victim of a relentless campaign which accuses him of far worse than the death of his wife. Allegations which he refuses to challenge…
Why? Because they’re a motive for murder?

Disordered Minds

In 1970, Harold Stamp, a re*tarded twenty year old was convicted on disputed evidence and a retracted confession of brutally murdering his grandmother the one person who understood and protected him. Less than three years later he is dead, driven to suicide by isolation and despair. A fate befitting a murderer, perhaps, but what if he were innocent? Thirty years on, Jonathan Hughes, an anthropologist specialising in social stereotyping, comes across the case by accident. He finds alarming disparities in the evidence and has little doubt that Stamp’s conviction was a terrible miscarriage of justice. But how far is Hughes prepared to go in the search for justice? Is the forgotten story of one friendless young man compelling enough to make him leave his books and face his own demons? And with what result? If Stamp didn’t murder Grace Jeffries then somebody else did…
and sleeping dogs are best left alone…

The Devil’s Feather

In each of her previous ten critically acclaimed and hugely popular novels, Minette Walters has explored the dark terrain of the human psyche to give us thrillers of exceptional psychological complexity and suspense. Now, in The Devil’s Feather, she gives us her most unexpected and electrifying novel yet.

In 2002, five women are discovered barbarously murdered in Sierra Leone. Reuters Africa correspondent Connie Burns suspects a British mercenary: a man who seems to turn up in every war torn corner of Africa, whose reputation for violence and brutality is well founded and widely known. Connie s suspicions that he s using the chaos of war to act out sad*istic, misogynistic fantasies fall on deaf ears but she s determined to expose him and his secret.

The consequences are devastating.

Connie encounters the man again in Baghdad, but almost immediately she s taken hostage. Released after three desperate days, terrified and traumatized by the experience fearing that she will never again be the person she once was Connie retreats to England. She is bent on protecting herself by withholding information about her abduction. But secluded in a remote rented house where the jealously guarded history of her landlady s family seems to mirror her own fears she knows that it is only a matter of time before her nightmares become real…
.

With its sinuous plot, its acutely drawn characters, and its blistering suspense, The Devil s Feather keeps us riveted from first to last. It is a dazzling reminder of why Publishers Weekly has dubbed Minette Walters Agatha Christie with the gloves off.

The Chameleon’s Shadow

When British lieutenant Charles Acland returns home from Iraq, his serious head injuries are the outward manifestation of a profound inner change: he may be suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, or it may be, as his psychiatrist suggests, the prolonged destruction of a personality. Though previously well adjusted and known as an extrovert, Acland now withdraws into himself. As he begins his recovery in a dismal provincial hospital, crippled by migraines and suspicious of his doctors, he grows uncharacteristically aggressive particularly against women, and most particularly against his ex fianc e. Finally, rejecting medical advice to undergo cosmetic surgery opting, instead, to accept his disfigurement and cutting all ties to his former life, he moves to London. There, alone and unmonitored, he sinks into a quagmire of guilt and paranoia until an outburst of irrational, vicious anger brings him to the attention of the local police: they are investigating three recent murders, all of them apparently motivated by the kind of extreme rage that Acland has exhibited. Now under suspicion, Acland is forced to confront the issues behind his desperate existence before it’s too late: Has he always been the duplicitous chameleon that his ex fianc e accuses him of being? Can he control this newly apparent sinister side of his personality? And why, if he truly hates women, does he in the end seek help from a woman someone as straightforward and self disciplined as he is unsure and seemingly out of control to repair the damage to his mind?In its timeliness, its psychological complexity, and its unstoppable suspense, The Chameleon s Shadow is a thriller of the first order.

The Tinder Box

A chilling tale of prejudice, ambition and cunning in which villagers react to a brutal double murderIn the small Hampshire village of Sowerbridge, Irish labourer Patrick ORiordan has been arrested for the brutal murder of elderly Lavinia Fanshaw and her live in nurse, Dorothy Jenkins. As shock turns to fury, the village residents form a united front against Patricks parents and cousin, who report incidents of vicious threats and violence. But friend and neighbour Siobhan Lavenham remains convinced that Patrick has fallen victim to a prejudiced investigation and, putting her own position within the bigoted community in serious jeopardy, stands firmly by his family in defence of the ORiordan name. Days before the trial, terrible secrets about the ORiordans past are revealed to Siobhan, and the familys only supporter is forced to question her loyalties. Could Patrick be capable of murder after all? Could his parents tales of attacks be devious fabrications? And if so, what other lies lurk beneath the surface of their world? As the truth rapidly unfurls, it seems that Sowerbridge residents need to be very afraid. For beneath a cunning faade, someones chilling ambition is about to ignite

Chickenfeed

A body is found in a chicken run…
Based on the true story of the ‘chicken farm murder’ which took place in Blackness, Crowborough, East Sussex in December, 1924. Norman Thorne was found guilty of the murder of Elsie Cameron, but even at the time of his execution there were doubts about his guilt. Still swearing his innocence, Norman Thorne was hanged on 22 April 1925. Bestselling author Minette Walters brings a thrilling story to life in this gripping new novel.

The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction

Never before has there been a comprehensive, inexpensive reference guide and overview to the genre of crime fiction like The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Crime Fiction. Veteran editor Mike Ashley’s historical introduction gives an overview of the crime genre, showing the background and development of crime fiction from the earliest days with Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler through to the modern exponents of the craft such as Elmore Leonard and Ian Rankin. His A to Z covers five hundred entries on the major writers in the crime fiction field, from Edward S. Aarons to Mark Zubro, from the cult favorites to the best known, including Marjorie Allingham, Patricia Cornwell, Colin Dexter, Jim Thompson, and Minette Walters. The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Crime Fiction packs more information into its author entries than more expensive hardcover reference works. Each entry gives a brief biographical background with highlights for the cross referenced key works, provides a full bibliography, and notes significant films/series adapted from their works. There are also added bonuses of a crime fiction glossary that defines the genre s special terms and expressions, such as hardboiled, impossible crime, and police procedural and four appendices covering key characters, key books and magazines, key films and TV series, and awards and award winners, including the Edgar Awards, the Dagger Awards, the Shamus Awards, and other important awards. Crime fiction buffs, mystery booksellers, and anyone interested in crime fiction will find The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Crime Fiction to be an indispensable reference and an unbeatable bargain.

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