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The Shape
of Snakes
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 neighbours. Her passing would have gone
unmourned and unnoticed but for the young woman who finds her and believes
- apparently against reason - that Annie was murdered.
Yet whatever the truth about Annie - whether she was as mad as her neighbours
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 20 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 20 painstaking years uncovering the truth - unless
her reasons are personal?
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'It's stick your
neck out time, but Minette Walters' new book THE SHAPE OF SNAKES
is likely to become one of the classic crime novels of the 21st
century... This is a brave, experimental psychological thriller
from a writer at the height of her powers.'
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| The Sherlock Holmes
Detective Magazine |
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