The Shape of Snakes
Minette Walters

ISBN:0333748603

Macmillan, London, 2000. Hardback. 1st Edition. Fine/Fine

Full number line reading 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Book: Fine. Tight and clean copy. Not inscribed.
Dust jacket: Fine. Not price clipped.

November 1978, the "winter of discontent." Britain is on strike. The dead lay unburied, garbage piled up in the streets-and somewhere in West London a large black woman died from head injuries in a rainy gutter. Known as "Mad Annie," she suffered from Tourette's syndrome, spewed curses and epithets, and was despised by her neighbors. Her passing would have gone unnoticed but for the woman who finds her and who believes-apparently against reason-that Annie was murdered. Whether Annie was as mad as her neighbors claimed, whether she lived in squalor as the police said, whether she mistreated the cats found starving in her house, something passed between her and young Mrs. Ranelagh in the moment of death that bound this one woman to her cause over the next twenty years. And in those years, Mrs. Ranelagh finds a wide web of duplicity that is brought home to its perpetrators in a climax of unremitting vengeance."Breaking all the rules of popular fiction, Minette Walters asks as much of her readers as many literary novelists, and yet she offers them a book as gripping as any thriller."-Times Literary Supplement (London).

Contemporary crime writer Minette Walters owes much of her popularity to a highly successful television adaptions of her books.

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