{"product_id":"the-scolds-bridle-by-minette-walters-3607d","title":"The Scold's Bridle by Minette Walters","description":"\u003cp\u003eWinner, Gold Dagger Award (Best Crime Novel), Crime Writers' Association Awards (UK),1994  'All of Walter's trademarks: bizarre crime, wicked women, taut suspense' Susan Geason  A triumph of brilliant, unnerving story-telling from the internationally acclaimed author of The Sculptress, winner of the Crime Writer's John Creasey Award.  Mathilda Gillespie has been dead for days. Her corpse lies in the bath. Pills have spilled on the floor. She has used a Stanley knife to slash her wrists. Or has she?  Obscuring the old woman's face is a rusted metal cage - a scold's bridle grotesquely laced with nettles and daisies.  But even this obscenity - designed to silence the wagging tongue of a nag - arouses no pity in those who knew Mathilda best.  Detective Sergeant Cooper is pressured to call it suicide. Dr Sarah Blakeney doesn't agree.  Sarah has seen a different side to the dead woman - but her defence of Mathilda begins to look odd when the time comes to read the Will.  Young Dr Blakeney has inherited everything - intensifying the desperate bitterness that has driven Mathilda's daughter and granddaughter to wish the old woman dead.  Isolated by gossip and suspicion, and at odds with her artist husband, Sarah knows only that she must make sense of what has torn apart generations of women and left a trail of grief that may only be explained in Mathilda's own diaries.  But along with all clues as to one possible killer among many - Mathilda's detailed, shocking diaries have also disappeared  Reviews  Walters's The Sculptress (St. Martin's, 1993) won an Edgar Award. Here, a wealthy but despised Englishwoman is found dead, the victim of a medieval torture device once used to quiet talkative women. A 35,000-copy first printing.  Britain's Walters, whose The Sculptress won the 1993 Edgar for best novel, excels at depicting monstrously dysfunctional families and the murder and mayhem they wreak; and old Mathilda Gillespie's clan is a humdinger. The daughter of this bitter, snobbish, nasty-minded recluse is a prostitute on dope; the granddaughter's a schoolgirl being blackmailed into theft by a rapist lover. Gillespie's own past contains its share of feeblemindedness, violence, booze, abortion and incest. When the old woman is found dead in her bathtub, a peculiar medieval device over her head (the ``scold's bridle'' of the title), there is no shortage of suspects in her Dorset village. Both the local woman doctor, one of the few people who could tolerate the dead woman, and the cynical artist husband from whom she is separating spar with empathetic Detective Sgt. Cooper as they search for a killer. The fact that it takes these very bright people longer to figure out the perpetrator than it does a not-especially-smart reader is the chief strike against this otherwise intelligent and enjoyable-if slightly overplotted-mystery, which is essentially an English cozy with distinctly quirky overtones. (Oct.)\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Book Express","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41821277061194,"sku":"3607d","price":8.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0618\/9101\/8826\/files\/3607d_da818f44-30b8-4b82-9302-57b0bae63325.jpg?v=1764346817","url":"https:\/\/www.bookexpress.nz\/products\/the-scolds-bridle-by-minette-walters-3607d","provider":"Book Express","version":"1.0","type":"link"}