THE SCULPTRESS

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by Minette Walters
Published by Macmillan London Limited 1993, 308 pages

Author Rosalind "Roz" Leigh hasn´t been able to write since the death of her five-year old daughter in a car accident. Her agent more or less forces her to write a story about Olive Martin. A woman serving a life sentence for the murders of her mother and sister and then dismembering the bodies with an axe. Olive never unveiled why she murdered her family members, and this is a story that would sell, the hard part was to get Olive to tell.
O. Martins appearance scared most people, even the prisons chaplain. She was obsessively fat and stank of sweat; Roz had a hard time to assemble the courage to approach her. How could she met this horrific woman – and make a story about two repulsive murders? “Olive Martin took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done she gave her sister forty-one” she churned over and over in her brain, numbingly repetitive.

From the first meeting Roz started to realize that there might be a story, a human faith behind this repulsive person. There had been five psychiatrists who classified her “normal” and there for she had not been sent to mental hospital. What was it that made this woman so mysterious? How could a sensible “normal” person do something like this? From scraps of information Roz stated to un nest a astounding plot build around Olive Martins family.

Among others Roz meets an ex-police man with some trouble of his own, not realizing that his disconcert is a piece in the puzzle. Roz is the one to bring it up to the light and solve it. This is also a bit of entanglement for the two of them and in the end they fell madly in love.


Walters named the book The Sculptress connecting to the key figure of the book, Olive Martin, who moulded wax and clay figures of people she knew in her cell. Also connecting to the state of the two murdered woman, in bits and pieces. The story takes place in our time, in the late 1980´s to be more exact.

Walters makes a hair-raising beginning of her book and the rest of the contents are as thrilling as the start. From chapter one: “Dirty blonde hair clung damp and thin to her scalp, black patches of sweat spread beneath her armpits. Clearly, walking was painful. She shuffled forward on the insides of her feet, legs forced apart by the thrust of one gigantic thigh against another, balance precarious.” The description of the main character of the book is colourful and imaginative. Walters hooks the reader from page one.


The plot linkage together thru the whole book so there was no lose ends, nor a dull moment. It is psychological thrilling and the excitement escalates thru the story plot. You could describe it to be unrealistic in the way Walters’s makes things happen but it is described in a realistic state making the story more credible.



My view: This book is a good book despite from Walters pushing description of Olive Martin repulsive personality. This turned my stomach but also caught my interest to g...